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PIWUL1837
UVODITHI VIUITO
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HOMILADINITEIRIRLITINIS
T R IKOLONILTICHILITIMINGI
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tramonimuotoilu dubitetun til Amituntmtninnimanninumbria
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TT
OUR LIVING POETS
AN ESSAY IN CRITICISM
BY
H. BUXTON FORMAN
LONDON
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18 CATHERINE ST., STRAND
1871
{ All rights reserved]
LONDON:
ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.
TO
LAURA BUXTON FORMAN
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
BY
HER HUSBAND.
PREFATORY NOTE.
A LARGE proportion of this volume has already ap-
peared in TINSLEYS' MAGAZINE and the LONDON
QUARTERLY REVIEW ; and a few pages of it have
been published in the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW. During
the last four years I have had in mind the design
of making the works of our living poets the subject
of a comprehensive and connected study; and by
putting forth from time to time such sections of my
projected essay as could be readily adapted to the
needs of current review and criticism, I have been
enabled to see my way more clearly to the comple-
tion of the design with such unity as a work on so
composite a subject could take in my hands. The
whole has now been carefully revised with the aim
of harmonising, rejecting what appeared to be of
mere temporary interest, and adding such matters
as might seem needful: thus every section contains
more or less that has not been published till now,
and several sections are entirely new....
H. B. F.
38 Marlborough Hill, St. John's Wood,
May 1871.
•
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION
.
.
.
.
.
.
PAGE
. 1
IDYLLIC SCHOOL.
ALFRED TENNYSON
.
MENELLA BUTE SMEDLEY. .
JEAN INGELOW . . . .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
27
71
87
PsychOLOGICAL SCHOOL.
ROBERT BROWNING . . . . .
WILLIAM W. STORY ... . .
AUGUSTA WEBSTER . . . .
.
.
.
. 103
. 153
. 169
: PRERAPHAELITE GROUP.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI . . . .
CHRISTINA GABRIELA ROSSETTI . . .
COVENTRY PATMORE . . . . .
THOMAS WOOLNER . .' . .
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT . . . . .
.
.
.
. 185
. 229
. 255
273
. 287
.
CONTENTS.
----
-
-----
-----
RENAISSANCE GROUP.
PAGG
309
333
MATTHEW ARNOLD . . .
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE .
WILLIAM MORRIS
RICHARD HENRY HORNE . . .
HENRI TAILOR . . . .
GEORGE ELIOT . . . .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
375
.
427
147
. 467
APPENDIX.
JOHN PAYNE AND ARTIUR W. E. O'SHAUGHNESSY
: 501.
INTRODUCTION.
Births have brought us richness and variety,
And other births will bring us richness and variety.
I do not call one greater and one smaller ;
That which fills its period and place is equal to any."
WALT WHITJAN.
OUR LIVING POETS.
1
"O sorrowful great gift
Conferred on poets, of a twofold life,
When one life has been found enough for pain!
We, staggering 'neath our burden as mere men,
Being called to stand up straight as demi-gods,
Support the intolerable strain and stress
Of the univcrsal, and send clearly up
With voices broken by the human sob,
Our poems to find rhymes among the stars !!
E. B. BROWNING.
'So they show their relations to me, and I accept them;
They bring me tokens of myself— they cvinco them plainly in
their possession.'
WALT WHITMAN.
OUR LIVING POETS.
..
INTRODUCTION.
The present age has been accused of being prosaic
and lacking romance of unfitness for the develop-
ment of anything truly great in art. The charge is
easy to make, but hard to sustain : it is true that
none of the arts as seen in this country at present
are greatly coherent, in the sense in which Greek
sculpture, medieval Italian painting, modern German
music, have been coherent. Tle art in which the
English have excelled for centuries, the art of arts,
Poetry, does not, it is true, present at this day that
compact appearance that the Elizabethan drama got
from a national coherence of sentiment and habit.
Still the esthetic in Man is probably as strong now
in this country as it ever was in any other age and
place, though, from the lack of a universal ideal of
B
OUR LIVING POETS.
life, the ideal in art is special to each great artiste
This comes from the disintegration of society that
has gone on a long while,-breaking and breaking
old ideas and institutions and forms of thought; and
the social upbuilding is yet to do.
A late phase of iconoclasm took its very highest
expression in the works of Shelley and Byron; and
the present race of poets are the legitimate and
unmistakable successors of these, and to some ex-
text also of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Looked at
broadly, much of the work in verse of the present
day presents the double aspect of reaction and out-
grouth-reaction from what was merely negative in
those two great spirits, as well as from a false theory
of art that carried poetry too exclusively into realms
of a rare and unnatural atmosphere; and outgrowth
from what these tivo, and the other two named, really
accomplished of solid foundation - laying in regard
to method-especially lyric method. Thus it comes
about that the very instruments of verse invented,
improved, or perfected by the last generation of great
poets, and used by them for one purpose, have been
taken up and modified in many instances and ways,
--sometimes to assist in the reëmployment of tradi-
tions long antecedent to those demolished by the
former workmen, sometimes for the building up of
new traditions on the ruins which those workmen
made.
INTRODUCTION.
7
TE
With the exception of Mr. Swinburne, in his re-
cent works, we have now no poets loudly and enthusi-
astically demanding social reconstruction, or indicat-
ing the means thereto. Nor is it easy to say what in
this behoof might be done by a temperate and con-
sistent direction of the poetic energy of the day; for
there is unquestionably a huge appetite abroad for
art-work, and for much that should be art-work and
is not. The greatest demand is for literary art; and
it is unlikely that artists, good, bad, and indifferent,
were ever more plentiful. An extraordinary amount
of poetry of one kind and another is being produced.
If we look critically at the literary history of the past
few years in this country, there can be no doubt that
we are in the midst of an epoch of no small splen-
dour. It is not merely that we have a goodly show
of noble and original works accomplished, but also
that the labours and perceptions of some two or three
workers have marked out broadly a course for minor
workers to follow up-filling in their smaller details
to the grand edifice, as the school of Flemish painters
contemporary with Rubens filled in around the out-
lines of his upbuilding the superb, but less superb,
contributions which it was given them to bring to
the great edifice of Flemish painting of the seven-
teenth century.
Nor is this all; for, if we were to go carefully
into the popular-novel movement of the last few de-
7
OUR LIVING POETS.
cades, we should find a very large share of what is
properly poetic energy poured away into pages of
work that cannot possibly survive the rush of these
times of impetuous production. Some of the novels
of the day cannot go with the rest: they must stand
as long as the language stands; and, while we are
content to merely note that the vast artistic energy
of the last two generations has been to a great ex-
tent wasted into channels that lead to oblivion, the
fact that such energy has existed seems to call for
some few remarks on the lines held to separate prose
and verse; and this seems more particularly desir-
able on the ground that some of the authors to be
discussed in these pages have used both methods of
expression in a manner at least noteworthy.
Whatever may be the ulterior objects of indivi-
dual artists, there is no doubt that, of all true art of
whatever class, the universal motive is idealisation,
the universal function expression. At first sight
it might appear that, as perfection in each domain
must be the end kept in view by every true artist,
the relative importance of idealisation and expres-
sion is a fixed quantity throughout the esthetic
scale; but careful consideration will show that this
is not the case, and that, as the arts become more
technical in their methods, expression rises in im-
portance while it increases in difficulty; so that,
whereas a poem abounding in beauties of sentiment,
14
CUI
2
INTRODUCTION.
D
thought, situation, or teaching, but deficient in
magnificence of style, is a valuable thing, a painting
finely conceived but ill-drawn or ill-coloured is
simply unbearable. While music, painting, sculpture,
and architecture, speak in special languages demand-
ing special culture even for initiation, poetry holds
the supreme advantage that its language is ordinary
language idealised; and this is why, in literary art,
the grand difficulty is to know precisely how, when,
and where prose ends and poetry begins. The es-
sence of the painter's art cannot be shown forth in
any degree except pictorially, inasmuch as there is
no dispensing with form and colour; but one essence
of the poet's art may be shown forth in prose, though
in the matter of external form we could not, of course,
confound prose with poetry. Obviously this much
will not be admitted by those who consider that
versification and rhyme constitute the essence of
poetry (a class, happily, almost obsolete); but who-
ever admits the starting proposition, that the one
grand motive of art is idealisation, must also admit
that a work (even in prose) which idealises thought,
fact, situation, moral, &c., is poetical to a certain
extent. All true works of art, it may be replied, are
poetical to a certain extent; and so they doubtless
are; but a prose work of art is poetical to this cer-
tain extent, not only in motive, but also in expres-
sion; for, though versification and some other me-
OUR LIVING Y
Y
POETS.
2
thods of poetry are necessarily avoided, the most
indispensable of the poet's instruments, idealised
language, is largely made use of.
Of the recognised technique of poetry, the greater
number of constituents are within the reach of an
able artist in prose, without departure from the prose
method ; but there are two which cannot be used
without departure from that method, and which
nevertheless do not of themselves stamp as a poem
a work executed in the poetic form : these are rhyme
and metre. There is a third which usually is not
adopted in prose, the process of 'translating to our
purposes' words already current, by giving them a new
and special shade of meaning—a process best charac-
terised as the polarisation of language.* Now it is
12)
1166
* Since this passage was published (some years ago), my atten-
tion has been called by a friend to the fact that the polarisation
of words' is a term used in The Professor at the Breakfast Table,
a book which I blush to say I have never read. I have always con-
sidered that, for whatever might be fresh in the views put forth
in the text, I was indebted to the suggestions of a very suggestive
passage in Thomas Hobbes's Answer to the Preface to Goncibert.
As the paragraph referred to is a very interesting piece of early
abstract criticism, I extract it:-.
From knowing much, proceedeth the admirable variety and
novelty of metaphors and similitudes, which are not possible to be
lighted on in the compass of a narrot knowledge. And the want
whereof compelleth a writer to expressions that are either defaced
by time, or sullied with vulgar or long use. For the phrases of
poesy, as the airs of music, with often hearing become insipid;
the reader having no more sense of their force, than our flesh is
sensible of the bones that sustain it. As the sense tre have of
bodies, consisteth in change of variety of impression, so also does
the sense of language in the variety and changeable use of words.
I mean not in the affectation of words newly brought home from
INTRODUCTION.
this process which gives the key-note to the most
important difference between the prose and poetic
methods; for, as the poet leaves to the imagination
an immense deal of the matter of his work which the
artist in prose would detail, so his individual ideas
are frequently indicated by a subtle polarisation of a
word where a prose artist would use a periphrasis to
convey his meaning. And this polarisation is the
travel, but in new, and withal significant, translation to our pur-
poses, of those that be already received; and in far-fetched, but
withal, apt, instructive, and comely similitudes' (Hobbes's English
Works, ed. Molesworth, vol. iv. p. 455).
Since my attention was called to the ‘Professor's' passage on
polarised words I have made a point of consulting his book; and it
seems to me that I must certainly be indebted to him for that par-
ticular use of the scientific term 'polarised' which I have adopted
in the text, and thought I had originated. Here is the passage in
which the Professor uses the word :-
“When a given symbol which represents a thought has lain for
a certain length of time in the mind, it undergoes & change like
that which rest in a certain position gives to iron. It becomes
magnetic in its relations ;—it is traversed by strange forces which
· did not belong to it. The word, and consequently the idea it re-
presents, is polarised.
· The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and
in print, consists entirely of polarised words. Borrot one of these
from another language and religion; and you will find it leaves all
its magnetism behind it. Take that famous word O’m of the Hindoo
mythology. Even a priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a
holy pundit would shut his ears and run away from you in horror,
if you should say it aloud. What do you care for O'm ? If you
wanted to get the pundit to look at his religion fairly, you must
first depolarise this and all similar words for him.'
The word is used here in a more strictly correct sense than
that in which I use it: it refers here to an unconscious change ;
but I use it in an active transitive sense to designate a conscious
mental act.
OUR LIVING POETS.
most extreme form of the very soul of the poetic
method, as technically distinguished from the prose
method — that condensed presentation of thought
which leaves a large matter impressed on the mind
by a very small number of happily-assorted words.
Periphrasis being in perfect keeping with the whole
method of prose, the prose artist but seldom produces
passages of a few words to be remembered perforce in
this way, but usually conveys the choice idea by
means of a considerably larger number of happily-
assorted words. He is never called upon to polarise
language, or to condense it to a greater degree than
an ambitious essayist, for instance, would do. In-
deed this artifice of polarisation, though one of the
chief technical beauties of poetry, would be some-
thing of a fault in prose, and would not be understood
by the public or tolerated by critics of workmanship.
Moreover, while it is not difficult to catch the me-
chanical trick of writing in rhythm or rhyme, to
obtain this polarising and condensing faculty is most
difficult —necessitating, in an habitual prose writer,
a radical change in the habit of mind not likely to be
compassed successfully by the artificial means of
study. It is a faculty implying intense originality in
the possessor's manner of thought, and a minimum
of imitation ; but it is possible to have matter written
in verse that shall be almost pure prose (even though
choice prose), and that simply from its want of con-
INTRODUCTION.
densation. When we say of a prose author, as we
sometimes do, “he is quite a poet,' we do not mean
that his periods are rhythmic--we make no allusion
to the form of his work; but we imply that he thinks
and feels as a poet, and that his language is indi-
vidual and remarkable for chastity, vigour, sweetness,
or any other desideratum of artists. On the other
hand, when we say of a verse-monger that he is prosy,
we do not mea; that his productions lack jingle or
beat, but that he feels commonplace feelings, thinks
commonplace thoughts, and utters both in common-
place language. So that what we find in the one and,
miss in the other is pointed at in these two popular
phrases as the important and distinctive attribute of
the poet-mere method being left quite in the back-
ground.
Not for a moment must one overlook the fact
that, in the transition to rhythm from the unrhyth-
mic, language acquires a certain afflatus independent
of signification. All that it is desired to insist on is
that neither this afflatus nor the musical beauty of
sound suffices to distinguish a poet's productions
from those of other minds, and that his distinction
tallies with the measure of his success in effecting
noble idealisations without transgression of the limits
within which language may be woven into works of
beauty. If any other criterion were set up, we should
have a discussion as to the relative merits of blank-
IO
OUR LIVING POETS.
verse poems and lyrics; for, on the one hand, there
is nowhere so stately and sustained an afflatus as in
fine blank verse, and, on the other hand, many of
the lyrical effects of Shelley, of Tennyson, of Swin-
burne, of Rossetti, are more musical than any blank
verse could possibly be. Such a discussion would
be obviously absurd; and it seems to me that there
is only one remove from this in point of absurdity,
in attempting to draw a strict line of superiority and
inferiority between the prose and poetic methods of
esthetic expression.
The mental faculty which enables the artist to
idealise, is perhaps best described as imagination
the creation of images; and the methods chosen to
convey these images outward to the world all come
under the head of expression, and are of course in-
timately dependent on the idiosyncrasies of individual
minds. Perfection in the artist's ideal must always
be the first desideratum; but the greater the perfec-
tion with which that ideal takes form, in whatever
manner of art, the greater and wider will be the in-
fluence, and the more vivid the delight to all classes
who receive the work.
But, however splendid and great be the style or
way of saying things, it is not that alone, or that
mainly even, that endears noble art-work to large
circles of readers : what does this most unfailingly is
the true artist's unlimited sympathy with all animate
1
072
VII
TE
INTRODUCTION.
If
and inanimate nature, shown in the exquisite sense of
the beautiful minutiæ of scenery as well as of its large
effects, and in rejoicing with the great and small joys
of great and small people, sorrowing over the large
and little sorrows of the lofty and lowly, drawing
near with infinite loving pity to the erring, whether
in petty weaknesses or grave sad crimes. These uni-
versal sympathies are what go to make up a noble
and wholesome ideal of life, such as all true artists
possess individually to a greater or less extent; and
this ideal of life, coupled with a fine imagination,
brings forth such fruit of idealisation in art as no
other combination of qualities avails for. This large
sympathy adequately expressed is the attribute of
great poets, and the most endearing of their attri-
butes. It is this that makes Shakespeare the king he
is over the hearts of men, and it is this that makes
the name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning still sweet
and grateful on the lips of all who have known her
as a poetess, however conscious they may be of the
shortcomings and sins of her style. This it is, too,
that unfailingly seizes on any mind which places it-
self in contact with that strange great gospel of Walt
Whitman's,—where, perhaps, it is found in the in-
tensest form it has ever yet taken. Mere sympathy,
however universal, does not make an artist unless
there be also the power of expressing it; and, on the
other hand, no amount of wordy ability will enable a
OS
own
7
2
POETS.
YY
OUR LIVING Y
man to express what is not in him--what he has not
felt at all events deeply enough to conceive some other
person as feeling. But it is very doubtful whether
there is such a thing as this great beautiful sym-
pathy without the power of expression in some ade-
quate degree. The expression may be perfect, or
it may be faulty; and, technically, a man will be
judged according to his success in expression; but
the strong probability is that whatever of this great-
ness of soul is in a man will find its way out in
some sort or another, and go to work in the world
in form more or less artistic. Sympathy implies ex-
pansiveness, and expansiveness implies action - of
which artistic exposition is perhaps the most intense
form.
These thoughts lead by a very natural transition
to the vexed question how far poetry may be an
offence to religion and morality,' and yet claim ex-
emption from attack on any ground but that of bad
workmanship; and, as immunities from attack on
the score of moral offence have been claimed at no
remote date by one of our principal living poets, it
becomes a primary need for the critical conscience
to settle, at all. events for the critic's own satisfac-
tion and guidance, the bearings of the momentous
question. Surely one may in fairness ask, ‘On what
ground is a poet, more than another artist, or even
nother man, to claim exemption from attack when
(
INTRODUCTION.
13.
C
N
he commits such offences ? Were the Lascivie of
Giulio Romano unjustly suppressed because they were
executed with the combined mastership of a Giulio
Romano and a Marcantonio Raimondi ? Should the
police have orders to allow the exposure for sale of
Holywell-street Lascivie, provided they be faultless
in production ? Every poet would surely answer
'No' to both these questions: and, if so, on what pos-
sible grounds can a lascivious work of art claim to
be exempted from molestation because the materials
with which it is produced are mere language, instead
of shapes and hues ? Indeed, if one class of artists
is more responsible than another for offences against
morality, poets are that class; for they paint in a
language which all can understand, and address
themselves to a wider audience than is commanded.
by any other set of artists. There stand the two
elements in every work of art; and it is just to hold
that it is the critic's business to appraise both;-
first the ideal kept in view by the artist while pro-
ducing, and secondly the amount of perfection at-
tained in working towards that ideal. Why do we
expe? from among us Dutch paintings of boors in
bestial revelry of lust and drunkenness, or St. An-
thonies undergoing temptations and persecutions,
depicted without regard to any sense of propriety or
decency? Not usually because they are ill painted :
they are frequently painted far better than glorious
14
OUR LIVING POETS.
saints and Madonnas of the early Italians, which
any curator of a public gallery would be only too
glad to acquire at large prices. If we merely de-
sired perfection of manipulation, we should accept
the Dutch abominations with hearts full of thank-
fulness; but we reject them because the ideal, real-
ised in them with entire success, is low and beastly
—is an offence to religion—morality— decency-
whatever you please to call it.
The mission of Art is before all things a bene-
ficent one. She has been from time immemorial a
handmaiden to the religions and moralities of the
various times and places through which her protean
transformations have been flashed since the com-
mencement of history. The main bulk of valued
art-product has always been that most in accordance
with the spirit of its time--most helpful and grate-
ful to the general mind of the age; and a very im-
portant consideration in appraising an artist's ideal
ism. What degree of correspondence has it with the
contemporary manners and feelings ?' Art never be-
comes separated from human interests; and the in-
terests with which it is most intimately blended are
obviously those of contemporary humanity. Should
we tolerate a Catullus now, however exquisitely he
hymned his uncongenial objects of worship? No!
Witness the fate of Little's Poems, even when Moore
wrote them. Conceive an early Christian poet vent-
1
27
INTRODUCTION.
15
ing his rhymes to a polytheistic community: he
would of course be hooted down at once; not be-
cause his periods were bad or his language poor,
but because he prated of things unseemly to poly-
theistic ears—or, as Mr. Swinburne phrases it, "un-
der the impertinent and irrelevant plea that his work
was an affliction or an offence to religion and moral-
ity. And so it will always be: a poet may “trundle
back his soul five hundred years,' without meeting
with anything like opprobrium, so long as he does
not happen to trundle it on to matter offensive to
the religious or moral sentiment of his contempora-
ries; but let him stir up any antique mud and offer
it as valid art-ware, and he will find that there are
plenty of honest critics ready to dare the charge of
impertinence and irrelevance for the sake of protest-
ing against such breach of good feeling and pro-
priety.
When one talks of offences against the religion
and morality of the age, it is not of course intended
to refer to the actual intensity of religious or moral
sense in individuals, because we shall always find
that there are plenty of people who commit, almost
without shame, deeds which the general voice of the
time would condemn uncompromisingly. In mo-
rality, as elsewhere, there is a grave distinction be-
tween the abstract and the concrete ; and when an
artist selects for treatment a subject of which critics
16
OUR LIVING POETS.
are unanimous in proclaiming the age's condemna-
tion, the verdict is founded, not on the fact that no
one is so depraved as to enjoy the work of art, but
on the unassailable consideration that the subject
would, according to the generally accepted ideas upon
morality and propriety, be held unfit for the mind
to dwell on with pleasure. Probably no one is so
Utopian as to suppose that there are not plenty of
specimens of villanous man’ ready to revel in all
that is base; but these are the hideous lower stratum
of human nature that has always existed—the ugly
frayed edges of humanity that no shears of civilisa-
tion have availed to trim off. If they have been
unable to work their minds up to the level of their
age, and must needs have works of art to batten on
such as passed for wholesome food under a grosser
system, let them go back and unburrow filth for
themselves from among the works of the artists con-
genial to that grosser period: do not let the esthe-
tic minds of the present day take part in the degra-
dation by producing for them, in a modern garb,
matter to gratify their lawless appetites. The artist
who does this lays himself open to attack on the
score of falsity and impropriety in his ideal ; and
he has no right to say his assailants are attacking
the man, not the artist—for the flaws in his work
are as much artistic flaws, if detected in the ideal
towards which the elements of his product are made
D
INTRODUCTION.
to converge, as if they were found in the convergent
elements themselves.
• It now remains to explain the order of precedence .
adopted in the following pages in treating of our liv-
ing poets; and this point necessitates a few words
on the schools of poetry forming or formed among
us. First, then, what is a school in Art? In regard
to painting, the term "school has more than one
signification : sometimes it refers simply to some
great artist and to the immediate group of his pupils
or imitators, and at other times it is used to desig- *
nate a much wider circle of workers as regards both
time and place. When we talk of the School of
Giotto, we refer usually to Giotto's supreme self and
the painters immediately under his influence; and
similarly, when we name the Eclectic School of Bo-
logna, we intend to take in merely the Caracci and
their immediate followers. On the other hand, when
people talk of the Dutch School,' they make use of
a very loose and vague term, and mass together sub-
jectively a number of works of as infinite variety in
their poor degree' as those they would mass toge-
ther in talking broadly of the Italian School.' But
in poetry the term is not quite so vague in its possi-
bilities of application. Every one knows what is
meant by the Elizabethan School of Dramatists, be-
cause the term has an historical association univers-
ally familiar; and the term 'Satirists of the Restora-
.
S
OUR LIVING POETS.
1
(D
tion' is only more vague in proportion to the more
ephemeral interest of the subjects treated by that
school, the lower rank taken by formal satire in
relation to that taken by the drama, and the smaller
calibre of the men making up the school. But when
we talk of the Idyllic, Psychological, and Prera-
phaelite Schools of modern English Poetry, it is but
vaguely felt in the larger number of minds that one
term at all events includes Tennyson, while each of
the others indicates some other person or persons
‘unknown. And yet the prospects of English poetic
literature (as separated from prose literature) are
probably shut up within those vaguely-understood
terms.
When we talk of the Idyllic School, we use the
word school' in a sense very nearly identical with
that in which we use it in talking of schools bygone,
because there are actually in existence many writers
who have imitated the style of certain of Tenny-
son's works with sufficient accuracy to make it ob-
vious in what groove their metric faculty has been
induced to flow. We take up publication after pub-
lication, and find, dotted about, poems obviously
of the school of Dora, The Gardener's Daughter, The
Brook, Sea Dreams, &c.; and, while Tennyson's
idyllic pieces are so superb in workmanship that
they must always stand out boldly from among the
multitude of less costly things to which they have
LI
IT
21
INTRODUCTION.
19
T
given birth, their method is yet sufficiently easy of
imitation to insure a respectable following of works
to be sought out and studied for some generations.
In naming the Psychological School of poetry,
the issues opened up are much more complex, and
therefore more vague. The great leader, Browning,
has followed a course so strikingly original, that near
imitations of him would be excessively difficult to
effect, -- à course so little popular that such imi-
tations, even if practicable, have been uninduced by
the market considerations which of themselves must
have sufficed to furnish innumerable aspirants to
Tennysonian imitation. At the same time there is
scarcely a poet of mark now among us in whose
works the influence of Browning may not be clearly
discerned. We have, besides this dispersed influ-
ence, some few volumes which, while distinctly good
and original, are just as distinctly to be affiliated on
the innovations of Browning's genius, though they
have not the same distinct flavour of imitation that
characterises work by some of Tennyson's followers.
The Preraphaelite poetry, mainly characterised
by its rupture with convention for the sake of return-
ing to nature, and, to come to matters of detail, by
its attempt to approach, more nearly than other poets
have approached, the actualities of language, dia-
logue, &c., may be traced in a large number of
poetical works. By far the best poet of the group
LU
>
20 :
OUR LIVING POETS.
is its founder, Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in much
of whose work the Preraphaelite ideal finds a full
expression, but who has been preserved by his abso-
lute quality of poet (whether of this or of that order) ·
from carrying a theory to the extremes reached by
some of his followers. The same may be said of
Miss Christina Rossetti, in whose works Prera-
phaelitism is found in its integrity, but not in its
extremeness. But in Mr. Woolner's earlier work
the ideal is brought to extremes of rugged simplicity,
-though, by the time he came to publish My Beau-
tiful Lady as a book, his year's had given him too
much taste to indulge in extremes. Mr. Coventry
Patmore, on the other hand, started better than he
has been able to go on; and in him the strife after
actualities has reached the utmost sublimity of com-
monplace.
It has been asserted that the present prospects of
English poetic literature are probably shut within the
limits of the Idyllic, Psychological, and Preraphaelite
Schools, not with the view of denying a high place to
any productions which do not come within the strict
meaning of those terms, but simply as an expression
of the fact that those schools include what is essen-
tially characteristic of the present era of poetry-
what is as new from a technical point of view as is
the present form of novel, when, in consummate
hands, its idealisations are compassed by means of a
INTRODUCTION.
2 1
balance of dramatisation, description, and analysis
unattempted by the earlier workers in fiction. The
innovations of the schools in question, equally with
those of the new order of fiction, are not merely
superficial, but involve quite new principles in the
technical procedures of literature, thus opening up
fresh possibilities to future workers; but this is no
detriment whatever to the many excellent modes of
procedure of earlier date, nor to any honest labourers
who may find themselves, by natural idiosyncrasies
of mind, au fait at some older method, while perhaps
quite at sea in any attempt at working in the new
methods.
.. Besides the amount of poetry of varied quality
classifiable under these heads, we have a great deal
of what may be called Renaissance poetry, also of
various qualities; and this Renaissance poetry must,
in the main, be judged purely on its own merits,
without reference to possible effects on future poets.
The Idyllic and Psychological Schools, on the other
hand, are so wholly and intimately connected with
modern ideas, as also is one aspect of the Prera-
phaelite order of work, that their traditions are doubt-
less destined to a continuation in the hands of fol-
lowers. From this point of view the Idyllic School
is valuable by virtue of the method developed in the
treatment of contemporary subjects otherwise than
dramatically—the faculty of making exquisite narra-
22
OUR LIVING POETS.
tive pictures of our middle-class life in its more
simple phases; and the Psychological School has a
wide applicability to the idealisation of the intellec-
tual and emotional phases of being which, in modern
city life, are so intensified as to preponderate im:
mensely in importance over the life of physical ac-
tivity; while Preraphaelitism has blended exquisite
work and fine thought, medieval intensity of beauty-
worship and modern naturalism, in the treatment of
high themes both medieval and contemporary.
Thus, in arranging this volume, the three com-
pact schools of poetry have naturally been placed
from any desire to distinguish him as the foremost
of our poets, but because, as a matter of history,
he made his anonymous début six years before the
Psychological School was founded anonymously by
Browning, and long before Preraphaelitism had be-
gun to assert itself under that designation. The
Laureate's name is of course followed by those of his
two most popular imitators—Miss Ingelow and Miss
Smedley; and similarly Browning's name, which
comes next, is followed by those of Mr. Story and
Mrs. Webster. Mr. D. G. Rossetti's name, again,
is followed by that of Miss Christina Rossetti, the
best disciple who has studied under him consistently
and yet not slavishly; and then come the names of
two other genuine children of the Preraphaelite move-
TOY
INTRODUCTION.
ment, Mr. Patmore and Mr. Woolner. Mr. W. B.
Scott completes the group, while standing partly iso-
lated from it on the ground of a strong preëxistence.
Of the six poets whose names come last, Mr.
Arnold, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Morris, Mr. Horne, Sir
H. Taylor, and George Eliot~composing what for
want of any better general designation may be called
the Renaissance Group-only three are unmistakably
Renaissance poets by virtue of the whole bulk of their
best works, namely Mr. Morris, Mr. Horne, and Sir
Henry Taylor; and the order in which that portion of
the volume has been arranged requires a little explan-
ation. Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Morris having both
been profoundly influenced at first by Mr. Rossetti,
and being the obvious historic successors to the Pre-
raphaelite group, their names might naturally have
been looked for after the names in that group. But
I conceive Mr. Arnold's right place is really between
the Preraphaelites and Mr. Swinburne, because this
disciple of Wordsworth has certain strong affinities
with Mr. Rossetti and his school, and because he
also certainly had some weight in-directing the mind
of the author of Atalanta in Calydon. There is, a
further reason for the order in which these six names
are placed: the three great literatures more or less
l'evived in our noble collection of Renaissance poetry
are the Greek Drama, the Medieval Romance, and
the Elizabethan Drama; and thus Mr. Arnold and
24
OUR LIVING POETS.
Mr. Swinburne, as writers of neo-Greek plays, should
come before Mr. Morris, whose poems represent the
Medieval Romance, and can only be called of the
School of Chaucer,' although his intrinsic qualities of
poet place him on an equal footing with his great
prototype. For like reasons Mr. Morris, though his.
works do not date so far back as Mr. Horne's and Sir
Henry Taylor's do, precedes those poets here as the
Medieval Romance precedes historically the Eliza--
bethan Drama. The name of George Eliot ends the
list because she also, in poetic style though not in.
dramatic method, assimilates the Elizabethan drama-
tists; and there also seemed to be some fitness in
making her works the ultimate theme, because they
form a climax of great modern thought and noble
feeling, while the incomplete development of her
verse-powers suggests transition to another sphere
of art than that sphere here discussed. And here I
would emphatically state that the term “Renaissance-
poet' as applied to these six authors has not the
slightest implication of obsoleteness or of subordi-
nate rank. For my views on the several poets I must
be content to refer to the various sections of this essay
-wherein it will be readily seen that such works as
Atalanta in Calydon, The Life and Death of Jáson,
Cosmo de' Medici, and The Spanish Gypsy are not
represented as ranking one jot less high on account
of any imputed kinship to the respective literatures
UVI
INTRODUCTION.
that have helped to furnish them forth with those
garments of word-work and form-construction always
handed on from literature to literature, and never
likely to be let die, by successive generations of great
poets, for the vulgar sake of being uniformly and un-
compromisingly original. Indeed this last group of
poets embody some of the most extreme modern
characteristics of our current poetic literature ; and
nothing that can be said here will convey to the
reader as clearly as will the several sections that
follow, how entirely I accept, as the natural and
proper outcome of this composite phase of social
existence, the composite literature here discussed, of
which no one man's labours seem to be other than a
portion of a great design.
ALFRED TENNYSON.
*Honey of the heart
Was ever in his gift; imaginings
Of purity were ever round him.'
W. B. SCOTT.
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.'
SHELLEY.
ALFRED TENNYSON.
THERE is probably no one alive at the present mo-
ment to whom we are more indebted than we are to
our Poet Laureate for good influences exerted in the
field of Literature. Among the over-censorious there
has lately come up a fashion of ignoring the magni-
tude of his claims because of the falling-off which it
is impossible not to recognise in much of his later
work; but whatever he may do or leave undone, 10-
thing can annul or even overshadow, to just eye-
sights, the great claim he has on our gratitude on
some very important heads: in the sphere of thought,
looked at apart from that of singing, he has done
much to help forward the liberal and large view of
things in contradistinction to the conservative and
small; he has done so at once without a shadow of
repulsive violence and without a suspicion of servile
taciturnity; he has put forward ideas on various
matters of life and thought in a tone at once manly
and refined; and he has created noble and original
models of language, looked at merely as language,
30
OUR LIVING POETS.
without regard to its being cast in the high form of
perfect verse. Following Shelley and Coleridge, it
was no light task for him to push poetic thought
forward, and to carry poetic form into new regions of
lyric beauty. But both he has done; and we have a
long series of works bearing more or less of testimony
to this fact. The time has gone by for noting how
lyric forms of English Poetry first got in Tennyson's
hands a tensity and perfect symmetry of growth
absent from earlier work, and that too without any
great sacrifice of those flower-like qualities of poetic
art wherein Shelley and Coleridge so largely ex-
celled. It is late in the day for noting even how
a lyric sweetness and variety—a singing variety—vas
first conferred on blank verse, as in Tears, idle Tears,
by this first and greatest of workers in verbal mosaic;
and it is almost too late to offer remarks upon the
perfect equipoise of parts attained by him in those
small sweet narratives which he has chosen to call
idylls, and which will now always be known by that
not quite appropriate name.
Most of Tennyson's best work has been, and still
is pretty generally, appreciated to the full; and
nearly all the good things a critic can say about them
have probably been said over and over again ; but,
without passing in review over the bulk of his labours,
there may still be room for a word on one or two that
seem barely appreciated at their due worth, either in
ALFRED TENNYSONTATY?
.
a
relation to the poet's own works or in relation to
work by other hands; and a word of dissatisfaction is
at this time more than ever called for on what an
American newspaper happily termed the 'lapse of
the Laureate.'
The two principal poems not quite appreciated to
the height of their value are In Memoriam and Maud.
It may seem an impertinence to assert this; because
by those who love art for art's sake Maud is doubtless
highly cherished, while to all intellectual lovers of
Verse In Memoriam is a book among the dearest.
For the poetry-leading public in general, however,
these works are more or less overshadowed by the
immense and undue popularity of the so-called Idylls
of the King.
In Memoriam is usually, as far as one can learn,
regarded as no more than a collection of lyrics in one
metre, admitted to hold a wide variety of thought
and expression, but not seen as a single chiselled
masterpiece with a vital oneness connecting all its
parts. I have known it gravely advanced that this
Oneness consists in a mere study of certain conceived
phases of human thought and passion, with the con-
sequent coldness of a mere study; but it is hard to
relinquish, when once conceived, the idea that the
poem gives expression to the sequent phases of a
genuine passion felt by one man towards another
separated from him by death ; and the fact that high
OUR LIVING POETS.
art has been brought to the rendering of this diary
of a forlorn passion into a noble form only adds to
the psychic value of the result. That Shakespeare's
sonnets had been studied by Tennyson near about
the time of this work's production, there can be no
doubt; and it is probable that a reasonable emula-
tion induced the Laureate to elaborate with combined
vigour and chastity the idea of a man's passion for a
man, which the supreme poet is usually held to have
elaborated with vigour unaccompanied by chastity:
still it should seem that this emulation would merely
follow the fact that the Laureate's conceptions exceed
Shakespeare's in chastity. In a word, In Memoriam
seems to claim eternal regard not as a tour de force,
but as a real outbreathing of fine human nature, ela-
borated to the height of high art. The work is
solemn and weighty throughout;-has no taint of
that reckless pride in strength that a mere tour de
force inevitably shows, and breathes a deep tender-
ness of soul from its very lightest sections. If there
is one section which, more than others, might be
held to want evidence of real feeling, it is the seventy-
sixth. It might be thought indicative of slightness
in a mourner to speculate as to the fate of his love-
lyrics, as thus:-
- What hope is here for modern rhyme
To him, who turns a musing eye
On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie
Foreshorten'd in the tract of time?
ALFRED TENNYSON.
May bind a book, may line a box,
May serve to curl a maiden's locks;
Or when a thousand moons shall wane,
A man upon a stall may find,
And, passing, turn the page that tells
A grief, then changed to something else,
Sung by a long-forgotten mind.'
But to me this seems to be the natural morbid sug-
gestion of a poet's grief; for how can a poet put away
from him the knowledge that men are to read what
he writes ? He naturally desires to impart as largely
as possible the beautiful grief he has tenderly nursed;
and yet half the beauty of the grief would be gone
in this case, if we were not assured perforce of the
genuine love for the mere utterance of it, expressed
in the fourth and final stanza of the section just
C
quoted ::
But what of that? My darken'd ways
Shall ring with music all the same;
To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise.'
The great value of Maud rests first on the fact
that it is modern and progressive in idea, truly dra-
'matic in principle, and quite original in its forms.
It is unpopular simply because it assails the slug-
gish indifference of the Briton to anything discon-
nected from a lucrative peace; and the unpleasant-
ness of the home-thrust probably blinded many eyes to
the fresh vigour and male beauty of those memorable
stanzas in the opening section :
34
OUR LIVING POETS.
• Peace sitting under her olive, and lurring the days gone by,
When the poor are hovell’d and hustled together, each sex, like
stine,
When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lic;
Peace in her vineyard-yes !—but a company forges the fine.
And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian's head,
Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled wife,
While chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread,
And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life.
And sleep must lic down arı'/, for the villainous centre-bits
Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless nights,
While another is cheating the sick of a few last gasps, as he sits
To pestle a poison'd poison behind his crimson lights.
When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fec,
And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones,
Is it peace or war ? beiter, war! lond war by land and by sea,
War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones.
For I trust if an encmy's ficet came yonder round by the hill,
And the rushing battle-bolt sang from the three-clecker out of
the foam,
That the smoothfaced snubnosed rogue rould leap from his coun-
ter and till,
And strike, if he couldl, were it but with his cheating yard-wand,
home.'
But to those who care to think, the Laureate will
always have a large credit for the farsightedness of
his (or rather of his spokesman's) political point of
view in Maud; and to those who study form, that
work will be ever precious as the foundation of new
possibilities in metric beauty, and as a splendid reali-
sation of those possibilities. It may be that the superb
march and flow attained by Mr. Swinburne in his
long anapæstic measures would have been got with-
out Maud's assistance; but in literary annals the
MITTE
UI
V
.
ALFRED TENNYSON.
35
fact must rest recorded that those measures first
appeared in their perfection in some of the dramatic
lyrics that go to make up this work, which is per-
haps the Laureate's greatest. It is not easy to ad-
mire too much in Maud the elaborate conception in
psychic dynamics carried out under the seemingly
simple scheme of action, that is the most obvious
thread of the poem. That the man who tells the
tale should have loved a girl thought to be 'aboje
him,' have shot her aggressive and insulting brother
in a duel, have fled the country and gone mad, and
finally have set out, after her death, to join in the
Crimean campaign, does not make in itself much of
a tale. The first admirable subtlety of the work is
in the suppression of strong character in the man,
whose father had got ruin and death as the only
out-come of some money - making schemes, and
who while hating and scorning the peace-at-any-
price theory of his times, yet makes up his mind
to keep from contamination by 'burying himself in
his books,' and thus indulging in another form the
selfishness he detests in the peace-worshipping age.
And no less subtle is the mastery with which he is
gradually forced out of his self-contained phase by
an intense passion for Maud—à passion that liberates
his soul so utterly from all bonds as to lead to that
reckless act which breaks off all his relations with
his country, and leads on to the total purging of his
OUR LIVING POETS.
mind in passing through extreme sorrow and even
madness. How his passion gets transformed to a ten-
der and genuine solicitude, in the time of his absence
from Maud and ignorance concerning her fate, is de-
picted in a manner worthy of what has gone before;
and no more lovely poetry can tell be found than
that section spoken on the Breton coast, and ending
with the lines
"Am I guilty of blood ?
However this may be,
Comfort her, comfort her, all things good,
While I am over the sea !
Let me and my passionate love go by,
But speak to her all things holy and high,
Whatever happen to me!
Me and my harmful love go by;
But come to her waking, find her aslcep,
Powers of the height, Powers of the deep,
And comfort her tho' I die.'
But perhaps the largest triumph in conception, as
well as in execution, is that reserved for the close of the
book, when the soul that has been chastened out of
mere cynical isolation, out of an unbridled passion,
to a stage of pure and unselfish love for another,
attains the merge of self in the large life of a nation
with whom he can at length find himself in unison.
There is something of the sublime in the manner in
which the man's persecuting phantom-the 'ghastly
wraith' of that love whose brother he has killed
still persists in dogging the man's soul with reproach
after he has developed the nobler personal love, and
VII
ALFRED TENNYSON.
CU
only fades from him as he succeeds in throwing his
personality into the uprising of his people in a sasi
cause. And it would be instructive to all poets evei,
of whatever degree, to note how, with the same ana-
pæstic metre-stock, the last section's firm majestic
sweeping cadence is contrasted with the first section's
fervid invective and over-impetuosity of rhythm. But
let the lines speak for themselves; I transcribe the
third and fourth stanzas:
And as months ran on and rumour of battle grew,
"It is time, it is time, O passionate heart,” said I
(For I cleared to a cause that I felt to be pure and true),
"It is time, O passionate heart and morbid ere,
That old hysterical mock-disease should die."
And I stood on a giant deck and mix'd my breath
With a loyal people shouting a battle cry,
Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly
Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims
Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,
And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,
Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;
And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll'd!
Tho' many a light shall darken, and many shall weep
For those that are crush'd in the clash of jarring claims,
Yet God's just wrath shall be wreak'd on a giant liar;
And many a darkness into the light shall leap,
And shine in the sudden making of splendid namos,
And noble thought be freer under the sun,
And the heart of a people beat with one desire ;
For the peace that I deem'd no peace is over and done,
And not by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,
And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames
The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.'
Beyond this, language-shaping in England has not yet
gone.
OUR LIVING POET'S.
Of these two great books, and of a large proportion
of the poems now collected in one volume—that is to
say of all the Laureate's labours up to the year 1855-
it is not too much to say that an acquaintance and con-
stant reperusal during many years only serves to yield
fresh enjoyment and increased admiration.
Those of the Laureate's poems which are certain
to hold real and permanent rank divide themselves.
into lyric, idyllic, and dramatic. As a poet influ-
ential, and likely to be influential, on other lesser
poets, he takes position chiefly as idyllic and lyric:
his strictly idyllic poems constitute a collection of
models in a new and admirable method, suited well
for modern purposes; but the idyllic method so per-
fectly used in Dord, so exquisitely modified in The
Brook and Sea Dreams, appears to have escaped
from all bounds in the so-called Idylls of the King,
Enoch Arden, and Aylmer's Field, and to have run
quite wild even in an earlier work, The Princess. In
the lyric division of work the poet has made several
perfect additions since 1855; and in the dramatic
division some splendid results have been attained-
the three most notable being Tithonus, The Northern
Farmer (Old Style), and Lucretius. The Laureate
is hardly ever dramatic in the full sense of the word
as applied to Shakespeare, Browning, or Horne; but
the expression is here used to indicate those of his
poems which are spoken wholly or mainly from other
21
ALFRED TENNYSON.
LUU
mouths than his own, such as Enone, Ulysses, St.
Simeon Stylites, and Maud. In these there is a
sustained strength and firmness of handling not seen
in much of the later vork, except the three dramatic
poems named above. Lucretius will probably be con-
sidered one of the chefs-(l'auvre of the master as
long as English poetry is read.
The historical materials of this poem are almost
nothing; and it is noteworthy that no less than a
monumental monologue should have been constructed
from the vague legend that Lucretius committed sui-
cide after having been maddened by means of a love-
potion. Whether he did so or 20t is a question pro-
bably never to be decided; but round the slender
thread of this tradition the poet has moulded and
modelled the most beautiful of the theories of Lucre-
tius, and worked them into a poem that must throw
the greatest of the Tiber-side poets into a stronger
relief than ever. The poet's range of subjects in-
cludes none or few more noble than this of erecting
a worthy statue of a fellow-poet; and when that
fellow-poet is one of whom but little is known abso-
lutely, whose death, it is felt, must have been grand,
though it is shrouded in mystery, to depict a fitting
death-scene is more than ordinarily meritorious. A
gross conception would have imaged Lucretius as
simply the victim of a vulgar mania, committing sui-
cide as any miserable, low-lived patient might do. But
G
40
OUR LIVING POETS.
VIE
C
the refined mind of the Laureate sees in the didac-
tic poem De Rerum Natural stuff for no such slavish
death. He knows Lucretius as "gods know gods,'
and construes the legend in full accordance with all
that remains absolutely certain of the man-his great
work. In that work he is a soldier in the cause of
purity and truth; and Tennyson conceives him as
utterly intolerant of himself when purity seems to
have vanished from him, and truth has become ob-
scure: once a soldier in the true cause, he will not
desert, and he turns fiercely on the enemy of the
cause, even if he himself be that enemy.
While some of the Laureate's works hold a lofty
place from mere beauty of colour and sound, this
poem takes rank among the best, not merely because
the execution borders closely upon perfection, but
because the thought worked out is beautiful and
noble. The prosaic words maddened by a love-
potion' are the germ of a vivid picture of the lofty
Epicurean who, feeling himself the victim of base
animal desires such as he loathed, could not consent
to live, and, unconvinced of the truth of Plato's opi-
nion as to suicide, ended his life by his own hand.
This climax is brought on with great skill: the dire
oppression of his feeling of degradation works him
into a state of hallucination,-he is suddenly the
victim of a waking vision-of a nymph running
towards him chased by a satyr; and it is the reality
ALFRED TENNYSON.
of this vision-the seemingly indelible impression
of base thoughts on the brain of Lucretius—which
overpowers him : the hideous indecision as to whe-
ther he desires or not the nearer approach of the
nymph, the sense of suspected rivalry with a satyr,
· Beastlier than any phantom of his kind
That ever butted his rough brother-brute
For lust or lusty blood or provender,'
culminates the self-detesting frenzy calling for self-
destruction; and the will to die by his own hand
brings comfort to the poet by reasserting to him his.
manhood; for, he asks,
What beast has heart to do it?'
The end of the speech is incomparably great, both.
as blank verse and as thought; it is, indeed, as rich
in both respects as any work of the same parent-
age :
"And therefore now
Let her, that is the womb and tomb of all,
Great Nature, take, and forcing far apart
Those blind beginnings that have made me mau
Dash them anew together at her will
Through all her cycles--into man once more,
Or beast or bird or fish, or opulent flower-
But till this cosmic order everywhere
Shatter'd into one earthquake in one day
CE
Is not so far when momentary man
Shall secm no more a something to himself,
But he, his hopes and hates, his homes and fanes,
And even his bones long laid within the grave,
The very sides of the grave itself shall pass,
Vanishing, atom and void, atom and void,
Into the unseen for ever,—till that hour,
OUR LIVING POETS.
My golden work in which I told a truth
That stays the rolling Ixionian wheel,
And numbs the Fury's ringlet-snake, and plucks
The mortal soul from out immortal hell,
Shall stand : ay, surely: then it fails at last
And perishes as I must; for 0 Thou,
Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity,
Yearn'd after by the wisest of the wise,
Who fail to find thee, being as thou art
Without one pleasure and without one pain,
Howbcit I know thou surely must be mine
Or soon or late, yet out of season, thus
I woo thee roughly, for thou carest not
How roughly men may woo thee so they win-
Thus-thus: the soul dies out and dies in the air.'
Throughout the poem are scattered other lines never
to be surpassed for roll and majesty; and it is hard
to find the poet's strength of hand giving way in the
final words:
· With that he drove the knife into his side :
She heard him raging, heard him fall; ran in,
Beat breast, tore hair, cried out upon herself
As having fail'd in duty to him, shriek'd
That she but meant to win him back, fell on him,
Clasp'd, kiss'd him, wail'd: he answerd, “ Care not thou !
What matters ? All is over : Fare thee well !”
This appendix is almost pure prose, and recalls the
ruin of the effective termination to Enoch Arden.
So passed the strong heroic soul away.
And when they buried him, the little port
Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.'
The advantage of knowing that Enoch's successor to
the throne of his wife's affections did not omit to
pay due funereal respect to the man whom he had so.
ALFRED TENNYSON.
43
L
horribly wronged is no compensation whatever for
the artistic flaw through which the information is
conveyed; and if the subject of Enoch Arden were
not such as to repel the bulk of readers from fre-
quent intercourse with the poem, this flaw would be
felt as a burden. It cannot be too deeply regretted
that an analogous imperfection should have found its
way into a poem so thoroughly great and desirable
as Lucretius. Having passed from the first “idyllic"
paragraph into the dramatic method, the mere le-
turn to narration is surely an anti - climax; and
looking at the able maintenance of the dramatic cha-
racter of Lucretius to the moment of the stab, it is
lamentable that the monologue was not worked up
to a vigorous climax. That the narrative given in
pure prose, in the narrator's words, could have been
placed by implication in the concluding phrases of
the monologue, cannot be doubted by any one who
has studied the monologue in its best forms; and
that the Laureate, having brought so much dramatic
genius to the construction of the work, might readily
have culminated his monologue triumphantly, is al-
most as evident. He las very greatly improved the
termination in reprinting the poem, not indeed by
removing the last paragraph altogether, as we could
have wished, but by changing the weak and meagre
line,
• What matters ? All is over : Fare thee tell!
44.
OUR LIVING POETS.
for the characteristic line,
* Thy duty? What is duty ? Fare thee well!'
This change is but small; but it gives to the last
paragraph a better standing, by opening up a truly
Lucretian issue and restoring the dramatic balance
lost in the dry supplemental narrative. The final
fall is the one flaw worth naming; and it is to the
poet's eternal credit that he has not only wrenched a
meaning of the deepest purity from the legend, but
has also, while treating the subject with the unflinch-
ing hand of no poetic prude, given us a work as con-
spicuous for external severity as some of the purest
and noblest works of Michel Angelo.
Perhaps the best lyric published by Tennyson
since 1855 is The Higher Pantheism in the Holy
Grail book : whatever be the philosophic or theolo-
gical issues involved in it, it has the true lyric note
of the author's best manner--a flash of the vigour
and originality of musical word - work that charac-
terise Maud throughout so many of its sections :
The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains-
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns ?
Is not the Vision He? tho' He be not that which He seems ?
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?
Dark is the world to thee: thyself art the reason why;
For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel “I am I'?
.
ALFRED TENNYSON.
45
Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest thy doom,
Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and gloom.
Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet-
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.
God is law, say the wise; 0 Soul, and let us rejoice,
For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice.
Law is God, say some: 10 God at all, says the fool;
For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool;
And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision–Tere it not He?'
Every now and then in the world's history some
variation of the pantheistic doctrine crops up among
the multitudinous false ideas to be found at all sea-
sons in the mind of man; and in these later times
an ornate but bootless pantheism has taken its rank
among the rest of modern mental vagaries. Now
and again the writings of Tennyson show a tinge of
this same pantheism; but in no poem has he given
it so complete and straightforward a treatment as
here. All pantheism, even the best worked up to
theory-pitch, is but vague and cloud-shrouded stuff;
but in no instance is any form of the doctrine thrown
into so perfect a poetic shape as in this lovely lyric.
The amount of dogma in the poem does not corrode
the texture, is in no sense insidious, and will not
force its way into the mind for anything other than
what it is. In general, these noble couplets appeal
through the ear to the sense of enjoyment for beau-
(
46
OUR LIVING POETS.
tiful harmonies; and in the one couplet where the
devotional sense is awakened, the theist's heart is
stirred by a sense of personal deity very remote from
pantheism in any of its forms:
"Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can
meet-
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.'
These lines are of course accurate enough from the
point of view of pantheism—the existence of God as
the good element in everything; but as lines which
will probably rest more firmly in the mind than any
other portion of the poem, they suggest a personal
omnipresent God, cognisant of the individual's joys
and sorrows, and sympathetically cognisant.
It would be exceedingly difficult to find a happier
instance than this poem of the fine effect attainable
by the judicious and sparing use of dactylic and ana-
pæstic feet; and, after these feet being used with
a delicately-retentive hand almost throughout, such
a line as the second of the last couplet but one comes
in with masterly effect with alternate anapæsts in its
six feet:
"För all / wě băve power | tỏ sẽel is å strāight | stāff bēnt | in ă põol.'
It is indeed a trial to turn from a poem like this,
and encounter on the very next page such a piece as
the following:
* Floter in the crannied wall,'
I pluck you out of the crannies;-
ALFRED TENNYSON.
47
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.'
Sans music, sans form, sans grammar, sans every-
thing.
It may be thought ungenerous to notice this
' little sin ;' but such sins cannot be unduly repre-
hended. What so rare a poet as the Laureate once
commits to print can never be suppressed, but must
remain against him in perpetuity--seeing how every
scrap put forth by him is treasured by hundreds,
perhaps thousands, against the day of expiration of
copyright. What he issues once, posterity will have;
and therefore should he take good heed to follow the
course praised by him in his predecessor and utter
nothing base.'
The latest serious task he has imposed on the
critic is not an agreeable one: it is that of discussing
in an adverse sense the claims of the Arthurian col-
lection as a complete work. Assuming the existence
of a series of poems wherein certain things are nar-
rated in the form of separate episodes, each complete
in itself and none necessary as a condition of the
existence of another; assuming such poems to have
been always found pleasant reading, in whatever or-
der read, each being worked out and rounded-in
in a manner not merely suggestive of, but betraying
clearly, an intention to produce a complete and inde-
D
OTT
T
48
.
OUR LIVING POETS.
110
U
1
Y
pendent whole; assuming thus much, would such a
series of poems rise to the dignity of one grand work
by the mere discovery that the author intended, or
might be assumed to have intended, to fashion forth
certain connected moral sentiments or religious doc-
trines, to be discovered by careful dissection of the
characters of the poems and deep consideration of
the episodes composing the whole ? I think not.
Provided a poet have the keen creative faculty of
setting before us living beings, whose lives and
thoughts come home to us with the force of experi-
enced realities, whatever purity may be in his soul is
sure to pass outward unharmed through the medium
of the mingled good and evil of whatever characters
he may depict; and in exercising the holy function
of poet force is more likely to be. lost than gained
through trenching on the noble function of preacher
by becoming directly appellant. In drama, mono-
logue, or idyll, the best path to greatness lies in
nobility of human conception and grasp and firmness
of human delineation ; and the attempt to make
human beings the types or masks of dogmas and
principles usually results in a greater or less failure.
Still, if one were called upon to reconsider, in the
light of some newly-discovered subtlety of ulterior
intention, a work of such strength in human deli-
neation that its characters had commended them-
selves as veritable men and women, and taught the
-
U
717
ALFRED TENNYSON.
49
(D
great lessons to be deduced from the lives of all men
and women, the ulterior intent might lend a new
value to the poem. But no clandestine thread should
ever create in discerning eyes a unity between poems
possessing no unity by virtue of palpable fleshly ties.
If a true poet have the gift of large construction
added to that of lofty song-craft, he will not need to
seek cement in the rich stores of religious thought
or codified morality: his religion and his morality
will be throughout and under all, not in set symme-
trical order, but blended into the lines of his work
irregularly, flashing here and there with the fluent
flashes of that grander conscientiousness which has
become a natural habit of the heart instead of a me-
chanical function of the mind. The most religious
man is not he who can repeat most glibly the dogmas
of his faith and quote the greatest amount of sacred
tradition, but he who has most faithfully assimilated
true principles of religion, and holds them dispersed,
half-recognised, unboasted, guiding and tinting his
universal life; and thus the greatest inculcation of
religion open to art is that accomplished with a fer-
vid intuition of rectitude, the lines and exactnesses
whereof are lost in the outlined fulness of a grand
human conception. For a poem wherein the intimate
tissues are thus qualified by an ante-natal religious-
ness, wherein the morality is not anatomical but cel-
lular, there will always be (to follow up this analogy
50
OUR LIVING POETS.
19
suggested by the high science of life) critical histolo-
gists to lay finger on this and that part, and announce
to the untechnical the quality and meaning of the
tissue ; but such quality and meaning would often be
knowledge as new to the poet's self as to the unin-
structed audience—knowledge indeed as new as the
chemistry of honey to the bee, or as the laws of uter-
ine gestation to the fruitful rabbit. Doubtless the
poet's mind would grasp and recognise the codifica-
tion deduced from his work; but he would deny any
intention that such codification should ever have
been deduced — his proper rôle lying outside and
around the considerations set forth by the critic. If
this were not the case, and if the poet's retort to the
critic were “ Yes, that was my intention,' then one
would suspect the human depth of the poem, and
examine scrupulously its texture to get satisfied as
to the order of the men and women delineated, and
the intrinsic value of the situations in which they
might be placed.
This is something like the attitude into which
the critic was forced on the appearance of the new
collection of Idylls, published last year,—The Holy
Grail, &c.
There was a note facing the title-page of the
volume, directing that the new idylls were to be taken
with the old ones and the Morte d'Arthur, and read
in a prescribed order ; in that order they were pub-
Lacell.
ALFRED TENNYSON.
lished in the pocket-volume edition of Tennyson's
works issued simultaneously with the new book; and
in that order they are also published as a separate
whole. Nor is this all; for a new position was au-
thoritatively claimed for the two series on grounds
of their alleged connexity through ulterior and or-
dered significance.
The claim was made by the late Dean Alford in
the Contemporary Review for January 1870, in an
article teaching us to regard the whole of the Idylls,
old and new, as a great connected poem, dealing
with the very highest interests of man. We are told
to look upon the King Arthur of those idylls as
figuring forth the higher soul of man. The sense
in which that term is used is laid down unmistak-
ably: it means the highest part of man—that which
leads and commands—that which is alone receptive
of kindling from heaven—this it is which the ages
educate - this which is susceptible of defeat, cor-
ruption, postponement of its high aims and upward
progress,-but which, in the long run of the world's
complete history, we have faith to believe shall prove
to have been well led, through all its compound ac-
tion and passion, by Him who has the hearts of men
in His hand.' This higher soul ‘in its purity, in
its justice, in its nobleness, in its self-denial,' the
Dean alleged Tennyson to figure forth by the King.'
In the King's coming in his foundation of the
OUR LIVING POETS.
1
Round Table—his struggles, and disappointments,
and departure,' Dean Alford save the conflict con-
tinually maintained between the spirit and the
flesh;' and in the 'pragmatical issue' he recognised
the 'bearing down in history, and in individual man,
of pure and lofty Christian purpose by the lusts of the
flesh, by the corruptions of superstition, by human
passions and selfishness. But,' he continued, “in
history likewise, and preëminently in the individual
human life, though the high soul of man is sur-
rounded and saddened and outwardly defeated by
these adverse and impure influences, yet in the end
shall it triumph, and pass into glory. This is the
theme which we trace through the Idylls of the King,
and, tracing it, we regard it as simply ridiculous and
beside the purpose to speak of the four which were,
or the eight which are, as insulated groups or pictures.
One noble design rules, and warms, and unites them
all.' Not merely figurative is the expression we
trace,' for in the article in question the next and
principal step is to trace through the newly-arranged
idylls the workings of that design; and most lovingly
is this done—such allegorical significance as may be
found in the poems in question being brought forth
to the light thoroughly.
We need not follow the late learned divine
through the details of his exegesis. It is not alto-
gether because he claimed for the poems in question ·
ALFRED TENNYSON.
53
Y
CU
-on grounds which are inadmissible—a place which
one must dispute, that this exposition is introduced;
but because also, in concluding, he stated that such
exposition was not 'a mere invention of his own,'
implying, beyond a doubt, that the poet's intention
was known to him to be that expounded: it was on
that known intention, and on that alone, that the
claim of greatness as a complete whole was based,
for Dean Alford said expressly that he believed this
general design to constitute the essential unity of
the whole collection;' and, coming from the source
whence it did emanate, accompanied by the autho-
rised rearrangement of the old idylls together with
the new, the whole exposition and claim must be re-
garded as a challenge from the poet.
If M. Taine's theory of a decadence in every artist
and school of artists is to be applied in this case, the
decadence period of Tennyson must be taken as com-
mencing with the issue of The Idylls of the King.
They are full of beauties in their own peculiar
manner of workmanship; fine ideas abound through-
out them; the music of words is heard through their
varying pages in many a perfect lyric; and they pos-
sess numerous passages which, for weight of thought
weightily set forth, have long ago passed into the
permanent station of household words. In fine, the
stock of the English tongue and the tone of the
English mind cannot fail to benefit from them. But
54
POETS.
Тут і т
OUR LIVING the men and women—do they individually and col-
lectively stand carved in the heart as well as shaped
in the mind? Does one feel towards them as towards
brothers and sisters, whether in misery or in triumph?
To me they have always, on the whole, presented a
certain remoteness, totally unconnected with the re-
moteness of the times : they seem too evidently to be
moved by an external hand, holding with a somewhat
painful anxiety all their threads, rather than by inner
deep-down impulses such as would lead us to lay heart
to heart with them and share in the burden of their
woe, or joy in the brightness of their joy. It is not
that the poems are wanting in pathos, be it remarked;
for much that we read in connection with the long-
suffering Enid, the love-stricken Elaine, the vanity-
befooled Merlin, the conscience-crushed Guinevere, is
moving and eloquent, as well as beautiful; but if we
analyse carefully the nature of the feeling called up
by this motive eloquence, we find it to be rather a
sense that such things as the poet tells are possible
as occurrences to ourselves, or to those personally
happening to the persons concerned in the poetic
fiction,-in a word, a lyric rather than a dramatic
pathos. Take the supreme situation of all, the
grovelling of the adulterous Guinevere at the feet of
her husband—the prostration of convicted corruption
before stainless and immovable virtue: one sees the
ALFRED TENNYSON.
55
2
delicate beauty of the pencilling, heals the large,
rolling, fluent majesty of the king's accusation and
forgiveness; but Arthur seems to speak less from a
form of flesh than from a sun-irradiated cloud, and
the dissection of Guinevere's conscience is not carried
deep enough to show the human heart of her in its
rags and tatters of sin, and also in its glow and
warmth of humanness, and thus fill us with a real
breathless awe at her situation. She is young,
beautiful, sinful, convicted, repentant; but these
qualities are thrown together in her rather with the
delicate strategy of great mosaic work than with the
naïve reality of what Mr. H. A. Page happily terms
vicarious thinking;' and unless the poet can so far
shake off the weight of all sense of poetising as to
place himself absolutely in the position of each in-
dividual treated by him, it is impossible that his
characters should attain the needful degree of insou-
ciance for convincing reality.
But the more important grounds on which these
pieces fall short of ranking as a whole lie in isola-
tion of interest, total unsuitableness of the plan for
purposes of large construction, and even what would
scarcely be expected—heterogeneity of conception;
for after all, whatever may be said about the peerless
conception of King Arthur in these poems, the King
Arthur of 1842 (the hero, that is to say, of the Morte
d'Arthur') is not the same embodiment as the King
56
POETS.
TY
OUR LIVING D
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Arthur of 1859 and later years. The former exceeds
the latter in reality and attraction to the intelligent
leader of to-day as greatly as the author's marvellous
lyrics exceed the maudlin sentimentalities of Tom
Moore. The Arthur of later times is made to have
too much of the apocryphal, unattainable demigod,
and we are apt to leave him with a sigh, as we might
leave an exhortation to do things beyond human
power; but the other is practical and real, as well as
noble and magnificent, and we feel that Arthur is
*Then most god-like, being most a man.'
The Arthur of that poem is before all things a man
of immense personal ascendant, and the traits of hu-
manity so plentifully developed throughout the piece
convey a warm sense of fellowship, even though of
worshipful fellowship : the quick pant of a strong
man dying, and who knows himself dying, rises to
our ears distinctly and pathetically; and yet, blended
with this, we find an indomitable fortitude and pre-
paration for every emergency, and that splendid
command of kingliness shown in the compulsion of
Bedivere to do what he has hesitated to do for love's
or duty's sake. It is probably in that one passage,
more than in any other modern passage on Arthur,
that sympathy and respect are most forcibly engaged
--there that we feel the hero to be at once a man
and a king:
ALFRED TENNYSON.
57
Yet, for a man may fail in duty twice,
And the third time may prosper, get thee hence:
But, if thou spare to fling Excalibur,
I will arise and slay thee with my hands.'
e
This electrical threat, embedded as it is between
death-throes and followed by immediate performance
of the task imposed, is one of the master-touches of
a masterly poem-a poem, indeed, so masterly that
it is impossible to feel its fitness of companionship
with the Arthurian Idylls wherewith it is now classi-
fied. The Morte d'Arthur stood alone when it was
published, and, as far as one can judge from all sub-
sequent works by the same hand, is destined to stand
alone — not, be it understood, from superiority to
poems in a different manner, but simply by virtue
of difference. It is straightforward, direct, muscu-
lar in every line; and in general order of narration
there is no swerving, no approach to that inversion
of points of time which suits the other poems well
enough as having no sufficient scope or grandeur of
action to magnify, as that does, the direct manner of
narration. Inversions of the order of time are among
the technical artifices tending to give a variety to
the texture of each Idyll of the King; and it is just
this artificially attained variety which, more perhaps
than any other consideration, separates these poems
irretrievably, and gives to them, when one attempts
to look at them as a whole, a bizarre oscillation most
uncomfortable to the artistic sense. No one can
S
58
OUR LIVING LY
POETS.
LU
ever truly think that, to obtain this pleasing variety
in each piece, the poet, having regard to the project
of making the whole a connected work whereon to
base his reputation for sustained power, elected to
use this form bearing condemnation on its very sur-
face as a form for divisions of one work: for to what
does this same cleverly attained variety lead when
considered in the long run of the series, and not in
the pieces as individuals ? What is the consequence,
from the merest common-sense point of view, if we
take up the old Idylls and the new, read them as
directed, and try to imagine that what we have before
us is one work, and that a great work? “Inextin-
guishable laughter!' We get on very well to the end
of the first poem, which treats of the advent of the
hero; but even then we are rather surprised, consi-
dering that we are reading an 'Arthuriad,' to find
the formation of the Round Table, the consolidation
of the kingdoms under one crown, and the twelve
battles with the heathen, disposed of in five lines;
and a still ruder surprise is it to find the King mar-
ried in that idyll, when we know that the history of
Lancelot's fetching the bride elect is to be given in
a later one. But next comes Enid, in the opening
of which we are introduced to Geraint as leaving
court with his wife, for fear her purity may be
tainted by contact with the ill-reputed Queen: then
we go back to Geraint's courtship of Enid, their
1
7
1
ALFRED TENNYSON.
59
marriage, &c. (an immense digression), and return
to the point of divergence to wind Geraint’s and
Enid's life up to what one would not suppose an
untimely end,—the death of Geraint, who
Crown'd
A happy life with a fair death, and fell
Against the heathen of the Northern Sea
In battle, fighting for the blameless King'—
fell, that is to say, in one of the twelve great battles
so summarily disposed of in the last book; so that
we come round again to the point we left there. The
next poem, Virien, is not so clear as to point of time,
but is more than any disconnected from the rest by
manner of treatment, though in it too there is
much retrospective discussion of Arthurian characters.
Again in Elaine we open on a certain situation, ale
carried back to work up to it again, and afterwards
pass on beyond it. Then in The Holy Grail we are
shown the death-bed of Sir Percivale, who reveals, in
dialogue with a monk, his reminiscences of the quest
of the holy grail.' Again in Pelleas and Ettaire
comes the forward situation, the knighting of Pelleas,
and afterwards what led to it. But here, in justice
be it noted, there is an attempt at the end to lead up
to Guinevere, the next piece in the prescribed order ;
the last line of Pelleas and Ettarre is,
And Modred thought, " The time is hard at hand.”'
For Modred sees the scandal of the Queen and Lan-
VUC
бо
OUR LIVING POETS.
To
celot to be near breaking into an open shame ; and
Guinevere opens upon the Queen in hiding at Almes-
bury. Then, as usual, the poet carries us back
with him to learn the particulars of her fleeing thi-
ther. Afterwards he gives her interview with the
outraged King Arthur, dismisses the King to fight
his final battle, and leaves him 'moving ghost-like
to his doom,' to return and show us the concluding
years of Guinevere's life. This must have been a
considerable number of years; but we are called upon
to annul the interval in our minds, take up again
the story of Arthur, and follow him to his death
(or rather his ' doom,' for he does not die at all),
although his passing is really far earlier than Gui-
nevere's. .
A more lamentable state of things than this it is
hard to imagine as the sober and well-considered
plan of a great poet; and it is hard to conceive how
the Laureate can have persuaded himself or been
persuaded to run the risk of challenging public opi-
nion by putting the poems forward in the charac-
ter of a whole ; for one must regard the scheme as
a hasty and ill-considered one, not as the mature
execution of an old and cherished design. To think
otherwise would be to undervalue those technical
abilities for which the Laureate has held for so many
years, and worthily held, an undisputed reputation
among the best modern poets. We are of course
TO
IT CU
ALFRED TENNYSON.
(
bound to accept the positive statement that these
poems are now connected “in accordance with an
early project of the author's;' but it may be accepted
cum grano salis. It is not at all unlikely that the
poet who wrote the Morte d'Arthur (prefixing to it a
scene of college friends talking over the epic whereof
one of them, the author, had burnt all but one book)
had even then conceived the notion of writing a great
deal more poetry of the same kind to lead up to the
grand termination already executed ; but in justice to
the poet's sense of artistic propriety in 1842, it must
be assumed that whatever project' then existed had
reference to poetry of strictly the same class-not to
little pieces of cramped scope and other workman-
ship which might be issued separately without its
ever being suspected that they were meant to be made
into a book including their great predecessor; and
perhaps we are farther justified, or indeed doing the
greatest justice to the author, in assuming that this
project had been long abandoned when Enid, Vivien,
Elaine, and Guinevere were taken severally in hand:
Granting this, and knowing how weak the flesh is
to sustain even the shadow of a relaxation of once-
accorded worship, how unwilling to submit to any
division of kingship, we can well understand how the
issue and approval of several recent works, on a large
scale, by other poets, should revive in the Laureate's
mind that ' early project.' If this be so, it was per-
11
62
OUR LIVING POETS.
haps a pardonable weakness in a man whose judg-
ment is so endangered by adulation to turn to the
popular Idylls of the King, patch them together with
a few new ones, crown them with the vigorous, youth-
ful Morte d'Arthur, and present them as his magnum
opus.
So far as regards the great aim claimed for these
pieces as an entire work, I must in honesty aver that
I fail to see that aim underlying the whole. The
idea of man's higher soul striving, through all ob-
stacles, to attain to a great altitude of holiness and
purity is magnificent; but, while possessing much
virtue for the inspiration of a noble didactic poetry,
it is not quite calculated to form the basework of a
noble epic or dramatic structure. In many parts of
the new idylls of the Laureate, this idea is plain
enough; but its ruling and warming and uniting
the whole seems to me the fiction of a kindly mind.
For, firstly, they are often cold; secondly, they are
not united; and thirdly, such poems as Vivien and
the Morte d'Arthur stand too rigidly apart for any
critic to maintain successfully that they are in any
sense subject to this general regulation. The Dean's
criticism was able and acute: it pierced to the end
of the question, and showed up thoughts correlative
to the acts expressed in these poems; but as regards
the establishment of those thoughts in the position
of an underlying and permeating influence, I feel no
7
ALFRED TENNYSON.
63
and the stras may be to it, au
conviction, and must always regard the grand thought
of the struggling soul of man and its weary noble
wars with the world, the flesh, and the devil,' as an
after-thought, supervening in all probability at that
point in the construction of these poems when Tenny-
son took in mind the subject of the holy grail. The
fact that all the poems may be wrested to an alle-
gorical sense carries nothing with it, and can never
drive acute men from the position that the idea on
which so much is claimed is more properly a coping-
structure than a basework.
An Arthuriad,' to be anything at all in our
literature, must at least possess unimpeachable great-
ness of form and indubitable flesh and blood; and
any 'Arthuriad' impoverished of these things must
step more or less within reach of the pungent sarcasm
of her who, discerning character and glory' in her
own times, wrotem
"I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years,
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle court;
To sing-0, not of lizard or of toad
Alive i' the ditch there,—twere excusable,
But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter,
Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,
As dead as must be, for the greater part,
The poems made on their chivalric bones.'
An antiquarian theme may seize on a poet with a
conviction so unrelenting as to carry with it every
modern requirement in conception and craftsman-
64
OUR LIVING POETS.
ship; but it is superfluous to say that poetic prepa-
rations carefully--almost painfully—elaborated piece
by piece, and held half-crazily together by some ab-
struse significance glimmering dimly in the back-
ground, remain outside the order of these old themes
galvanised into new life-revive no waning reputa-
tions-are no capital boon to the reading world-
and bring no profit to the poet beyond what may be
roundly and grossly told in terms of pounds, shil-
lings, and pence.
We may respect the oneness of sentiment shown
by those who accept the collection in the light of a
magnum opus — respect the sturdy determination to
support the popular idol in every position. Tenny-
son never has been reputed a poet of large construc-
tiveness; and we cannot expect those who, ignoring
Maud, have yet supported his reputation as a grow-
ing one through the issue of the old Idylls, Enoch
Arden, and the new Idylls, to trouble themselves
much about the question of construction and concep-
tion. But to those who held by Maud, when that
beautiful work came out in its originality and excel-
lence of form, in its truth of humanness, and in its
large and subtle dramatic unity came out too decked
in à new guise of that old lyric loveliness always the
salient characteristic of the Laureate's books—came
out and was received with general coldness and occa-
sional contempt--to those who built on Maud large
7
ALFRED TENNYSON.
65
hopes of an ever-increasing greatness in Tennyson's
poetry, had those hopes undermined by The Idylls of
the King and toppled over by Enoch Arden, it comes
home as a bitter jest to be asked to take the collected
Idylls as what they now aspire to be thought.
Having got from the Laureate three relays of
overgrown idylls, we cannot but long—not for an-
other Maud : that were too covetous--but, say, for
an extension of that perfect marvel of harmonious
work and conception printed in modest little type at
the end of Enoch Arden, &c., and called Boadicëa,
and ' an experiment.' Experiment or not, Boadicëa,
even as she figures in this short fragment, outweighs
in human truth and artistic value whole hosts of
Enochs and Arthurs; and her terrible ferocity in
revolt against a hideous ill is of greater price than
twenty quests after the shadowy phantom of a sa-
cramental cup. Another ' experiment in the same
volume excites a great thirst for more of the same
quality and style—the Catullian hendecasyllabics,
addressed to an imaginary chorus of indolent re-
viewers,
“Irresponsible, indolent reviewers.'
Most reviewers were in effect too indolent to appraise
fairly this delicious little gem, or to point out where
it failed or fell short of its own ideal. The metre in
which it is written is one of the most difficult for
English hands. Some writers who have written small
(D
T
66
POETS.
Y
OUR LIVING poems or fragments in it and I recall no instance
of a considerable English poem in it—some writers
are contented to regard it as a quantitative metre
alone, thus doing a certain violence to our tongue,
and consequently to ordinary English ears : others
regard accent alone, and disregard quantity; but the
Laureate's specimen combines in a great degree both
elements, and naturalises the metre thoroughly while
keeping its classic ideal almost uninfringed. Mr.'
Swinburne's poem in this metre is one of the best
from a technical point of view. It begins-
In the mõnth | lông |clĩne Of | rösẽs,”
and should, of course, be scanned throughout as
above shown ; but it makes a hazardous start, from
the fact that almost any unclassical eye will read
this line as consisting of two anapæsts, an iambus,
and an amphibrach, thus-
| In thẻ mõnth | of the lõng | decline | bf rõsẽs,”
ignoring the quantity given to the i of 'in' by the
position of that word before ' the. No such line can
be found in the Laureate's sample: most of the lines
are quite perfect. Perhaps the best line in the lan-
guage as a specimen of the metre is
"Since I blush to belaud myself a moment;'
and none in the poem fall gravely away from this
pattern, except one: the one referred to is not
Hard, hard, hard is it only not to tumble,'
ALFRED TENNYSON.
because there the initial spondee takes the place of
a trochee with the evident purpose of creating an
artistic hesitancy. But the line
"O blāſtānt mäglăzīnes / régārd | mě rāthěr,'
is not a Catullian hendecasyllable at all, but the
ordinary Italian hendecasyllable that cuts up the
severity of so much of our great blank verse. The
line would come right by a simple change-
"Blātănt | *düll măgășzīnes rēſgard mě | rāthěr,'
and it is surprising that the fault and its remedy
have never occurred to the Laureate.
peared in Tennyson's blank verse, not in it of old,
and scarcely to be regarded either as accidental or as
beneficial_namely the introduction, here and there,
of absolutely formless lines into an otherwise finely-
woven fabric—such lines, for instance, as
Tower after tower, spire beyond spire (Holy Grail, p. 47),
which can only be painfully scanned by making
'tower' first a monosyllable and then a dissyllable,
and subjecting 'spire' to the inverse process. Almost
the same sort of formlessness is in the line
Ulfius, and Brastias, and Bedivere? (Ibid. p. 9),
almost the same, because the line is to be iambified
* Any monosyllable of the same quantity will do as well.
OUR LIVING POETS.
by an analogous inconsistency as regards the two
letters 'i' in ‘Ulfius' and 'Brastias. Perhaps the
most disagreeable and impracticable instance is the
line-
And the sword of the tourney across her throat' (Ibid. p. 118),
which can be read as a fine line by recklessly bestow-
ing on the words 'the' and 'of' a weight which they
could only carry ridiculously. These things are noted
because the Laureate's ideal of poetry includes im-
mense perfection in the details, and because these
flaws have been evidently made intentionally to give
variety, which variety is merely disfiguring.
Whatever be the nature of the Laureate's poems
from time to time issued, there is one thing which
we seem, so far, to be always, with trifling excep-
tions, safe in expecting -- namely samples of the
English tongue which, regarded merely as terse, bril-
liant, crisp, and absolutely compact specimens of
expression, almost no one can rival. Tennyson has
reduced the combined clarity, brevity, and pithiness
of our language to the lowest term yet attained; and
probably there is hardly a keenly-observant writer of
the day, whether he write in prose or in verse, but
has largely benefited by the simple linguistic refine-
ments of the Laureate. With him the language has
become so highly tempered, and at the same time so
malleable, that no condensation of much matter into
ALFRED TENNYSONYNTY
69
V
. ·
a small space, no weaving of words into metres and
rhythms supposed impracticable, seems to be beyond
the reach of his cunning hand. The splendid results
now and again attained, in exercising this power in
fresh directions, render more poignant than it would
otherwise be our chagrin at the Laureate's persist-
ence in devoting his noble powers to work less than
noble.
II.
MENELLA BUTE SMEDLEY.
A sharp keen sight to track the spire
Of delicate motive, in the ways
Of Love ;-a mellow voice to raise
With skilful smiting of the lyre.'
MENELLA BUTE SMEDLEY.
THE question why the stage-drama should be as de-
graded as it now is in this country is one rather of
minute ethics than of esthetics—the answer resting
not in the incapacity of authors, but in the degė-
nerate tastes of audiences. The same prevailing
state of mind which has supported a vast deal of
literature to be classed as low, rather than as light,
has called for a low-pitched sensationalism combined
with a puerile realism in stage representations; and
the class of people who form the bulk of contem-
porary theatre-audiences are not such as care to have
their minds lifted out of the restless stupor they get
by soaking in what is uniformly base from an esthetic
point of view.
Consequently, new legitimate plays have not of
late years been attempted for the British stage—or,
if they have, they have failed ; and dramatic talent
has been turned rather towards subjects quite unfit
to offer to a British audience nowadays, these sub-
jects being treated in a way which would ensure the
contempt of such audience.
The question whether a higher tone of drama
74
JY
OUR LIVING POETS.
than we now witness might not be introduced with
permanent advantage—whether the taste might not
be led a step or two. by an infusion of soundness in
a light fabric—is grave and hard to answer.
In Miss Smedley's well-known volume of poems
the chief piece is a play-Lady Grace; and if such
a result as that referred to were to be attained, it is
perhaps in such plays as Lady Grace that we might
seek a model; though, to speak truth, it may be
feared that the tone of this work is fạr too pure, the
dashes of poetic thought and comeliness of diction
far too frequent and refined, to leave much hope of
such a result from placing that play, or other such
plays, on the stage.
Yet here are excellent adaptabilities for stage-
work of today. The subject is one of modern 'high
life,' the scenes of a rapid enough variety, the in-
terest thoroughly sustained throughout, and the
lighter dialogue brilliant and often amusing. Cer-
tainly we cannot taunt Miss Smedley with having
woven into the web of her work any sufficiency of
sensationalism and vulgar realism to meet the grim
demand for false emotion and real properties;' for
indeed here her play would utterly fail : yet she has
bestowed considerable care on the rendering of every-
thing perfectly perspicuous, so that, the bent of the
action would need no elucidative comment or pause
of reflection. The speeches and dialogues, taken in
MENELLA BUTE SMEDLEY.
detail, are as free from involution as the larger out-
lines; and yet the speech is never vapid or trivial,
any more than the set of the main current is eyer
faltering or obscure.
From a literary point of view the author is no
more to be passed by with the daily crowd of poet-
asters and playwrights than from a histrionic point
of view. The materials of the drama Lady Grace are
equally well selected in whichever light we regard
them. Lady Grace Aumerle, a rich young widow,
whose husband has had rather her reverence than
the full current of the love of a rich nature, finds
herself surrounded by suitors, none of whom she
affects, and in sore want of some object to spend her
love upon : she makes overtures to an orphan ne-
phew and niece to become her adopted children, and
then tries to win from them a frankness of affection
which has been put beyond their power to yield by
small corruptions of the world in which they have
grown to young man and approximate young woman,
Down the footway of failure after failure to make,
these young people love her and trust her with open-
ness, the lady glides step by step to a state of mind
bordering on despair of finding a noble use for her
life; and when at last she gets her niece out of a
foolish scrape at the expense of her own good name,
she is on the point of joining a 'sisterhood of mercy.'
But in the mean time a real affection has been grow-
OUR LIVING POETS.
ing in her heart towards a young lawyer, Cranston,
entrusted with her affairs, and who has loved her
years before her marriage, though she does not re-
cognise in the lawyer a boy with whom, under a
different name, she played as a girl. Cranston hesi-
tates to woo the Lady Grace, not on the mean
ground that she is above him in rank, but because
he has in his possession a sealed codicil to her hus-
band's will, under which it is willed that, if she marry
again, the half of her fortune should go to her niece
and nephew, the other half being settled, not on her,
but on her second husband; and also that no com-
munication to this effect be made to the lady unless
she be married again—a delicate and almost insur-
mountable obstacle to an offer of marriage from a
man of noble character such as Cranston is painted.
In her desperation she holds friendly counsel with
this Cranston; and the position in which he is thus
placed is sustained by him with an ability and self-
control productive of some fine passages of speech.
In discussing her disappointment with her young
relatives he trenches with great finesse on the subject
next his heart. "A crown is in your reach,' he says;
and again,
*Your life lies out before you like a field
Wherein you have but paced a little way;
What matter if you stumbled ? Stand upright,
Pass by the grave where you have wept enough,
Pass it, and leave your tender thoughts upon it,
MENELLA BUTE SMEDLEY.
Your faithful memories, your gracious flowers;
But not your hopes, but not your living self!
Go on to better joys.'
And when the lady doubts the possibility of fol-
lowing such happy counsel, he urges her to seek a
haven in love, to elect a companion from among the
men around her:
Choose nobly-choose at once!
Your equal, lest men scorn you in your choice;
Your master, lest you scorn yourself in him;
Your slave-but that is sure. And, having chosen
Make love the centre of your days, and leave
All else upon the verge.
So successfully does he veil his heart's meaning
in the phrases thus beautifully turned by the poet,
that the lady feels herself shamed by his apparent
coldness; and, failing his love, she would have taken
his advice as far as possible by marrying one of her
suitors, Lord Lynton, but for her niece’s fortunate
scrape, which, in robbing her of her good name,
withdraws Lord Lynton from the competition, and
leaves the field again open for Cranston.
When the lady, unwitting of her husband's tender
care for her future, decides to quit society on finding
her good fame clouded and her efforts to gain her
niece and nephew frustrated, she instructs Cranston
to prepare a deed making over her fortune to the
young people, with the exception of a small annuity
for her own use; and then it is that Cranston dares
to speak, and Lady Grace to own the strange attrac-
UU
OUR LIVING POETS.
tion she has felt for him, and indeed to accept him.
On learning that Cranston is her old playmate, she
exclaims,
You give me back
Some of the secret honour that I lost
When my heart sprang to meet you'-
a touch in which we discern a hand well schooled to
leave no trait of the lady's delicacy of sentiment un-
developed.
There is no need to dwell upon the points of
beauty, or of pith and epigrammatic force plentiful
enough in this play, or upon the successful sketchi-
ness of the minor characters. Without disparage-
ment to the rest of the volume, it may be frankly
said that this piece is far stronger than the general
run of its companion pieces, and that the dramatic
method would therefore seem to be that in which
Miss Smedley excels. This opinion is certainly
strengthened by a consultation of Good Words for
June 1869, wherein appeared a dramatic sketch' by
Miss Smedley, entitled Choice-a piece which has
attracted but little attention considering its merits.
The choice which gives the piece its title is that of a
young man at Cambridge, who carries all before him
up to the point of becoming senior wrangler, and
whose friends are bent on a lustrous political career
for him—a career for which his genius is eminently
fitted, by universal consent. He meanwhile, with
A
MENELLA BUTE SMEDLEY.
one of those hearts so rarely met, imbued with a
sincere religious fire, conceives that he is called by
God to help to alleviate the miseries of the world by
action in a pastoral course. Under a heavy hand
this subject must have resulted in a very unpleasing
sketch ;' but under the delicate touch of the artist
who could produce Lady Grace, we should expect,
and we certainly get, something at once refined and
touching. The choice is excessively well given in two
scenes—the first between the senior wrangler and
a crowd of congratulating friends at Cambridge, and
the second between the young man and his mother,
who has just parted from friends pledged to put her
son in the way of making his political fortune, and
who is full of ambitious thoughts, dashed to the
ground by the revelation of his choice in life. The
sequel to this sketch, Work, published in the same
magazine in January 1870, is scarcely as well handled,
though it too has considerable dramatic power. The
subject is still more difficult to treat well, and the
result proportionately less pleasing.
There is one poem in the volume with Lady
Grace which shows, in a different form, much the
same calibre of dramatic capacity as is to be seen in
these strictly dramatic pieces. It is a monologue
entitled A Letter', wherein a girl pines aloud for her
absent lover, and suddenly brightens on opening a
letter to say he is coming back from abroad. It is
80
OUR LIVING POETS.
.
exceedingly well done, and full of life and blood. It
might well be wished that the book contained more
poems of this sort, although the lyrical pieces which
make up the bulk of the remainder are not to be
classed with everyday verse. In some of a more
imaginative class a very delicate fancy is apparent,
and notably in two or three designated 'parables ;'
one of these, Eremos and Eudemon, combines a
refined intellectuality with a moving pathos, and is
charmingly finished. Another parable, The little fair
Soul, addresses a narrower circle: the reader may
sympathise or not with the situation—a little fair
soul in 'Paradise welcoming a brother soul outside,
and pleading for him ; but there can scarcely be two
opinions about the power of pathos and niceness of
expression in these three concluding verses, for ex-
ample ::
Up all the shining heights he prayed
For that poor Shadow in the cold;
Still came the word, “Not ours to aid;
We cannot make the doors unfold.”
C
But that poor Shadow, still outside,
Wrung all the sacred air with pain,
And all the souls went up and cried
Where never cry was heard in vain.
No eye beheld the pitying Face,
The answer pone might understand,
But dimly through the silent space
Was seen the stretching of a Hand.'
X
Two poems at the opening of the volume are
notably acute in their analysis the first of a Cha-
MENELLA BUTE SMEDLEY.
SI
racter,' the second of' a Contrast' of characters; and
these two poems as much as any justify the position
here assigned to the author. When we read in A
Character of a 'leader'
'Not vaunting any daily death,
Because he scorns the thing that dies,
And not in love with any breath
That might proclaim him grand or wise,'
is not an echo stirred in the memory ?-a faint echo,
but still an echo ? And when we are told that
‘Such a leader lifts his times
Out of the limits of the night,
And, falling grandly, while he climbs,
Falls with his face toward the height,'
does not the echo take on a greater distinctness ? If
not, try A Contrast, which is a better poem than A
Character, being more extended in subject, and more
valuable for the touches of human nature in it:
Sometimes a little evil voice
Speaks, and is silenced by a prayer;
Sometimes she sees the face of care,
That having wept, she may rejoice.
She touches sorrow with her hand,
Taught softly not to shrink nor frown,
But bring her pity bravely down
To depths she cannot understand.'
The echo becomes palpable! These verses are all
sufficiently like Tennyson, and yet sufficiently unlike
-like enough for us to know the method studied by
a very able poet, and unlike enough to leave no doubt
OUR LIVING POETS.
as to the ability of such poet; unlike enough to stand
alone on their own merits, and yet like enough for
purposes of classification. It is only in poets of the
very highest order that we find a special manner of
execution at once thoroughly beautiful and quite
original; and Tennyson has worked out such a man-
ner to a high pitch of perfection. Unless a life be
devoted to poetry, it is impossible that this can be
done; still there are many writers who have a great
deal of good thought and sentiment fitter to be given
out in verse than in prose, and who have yet not the
muscular individuality, or perhaps the time, to work
out a method. To such, a model for style or man-
ner is indispensable; and the Laureate need hardly
grudge us any amount of sterling poetry put into a
pleasing form by the aid of his technical procedures.
Miss Smedley in her lyrical pieces is about the best
of his disciples; and her poetic thought is as indi-
vidual and original as her lyric versification at its
best is Tennysonian. We do not look for anything
higher than this except in the few chief poets of the
day; and to say that, besides an excellent drama,
Miss Smedley has given us several very sweet poems
of Tennysonian character in execution, is no small
praise. In one of these pieces, When the News about
the 'Trent came, there is some of the most perfect
finish attainable. The patriotism is full without
being blatant, and the feeling delicate without being
MENELLA BUTE SMEDLEY.
83
weak or puny. The luscious twilight of the opening
verses is an exquisite sample of the translation of a
real scene to words; but more exquisite is the nicety
with which the patriotic feelings aroused amid such
a scene by the news brought to our shores (news of
the seizure of Mason and Slidell, the Southern com-
missioners bound for England on board the “Trent)
is pinned to each detail of that land which the night
is gradually absorbing from the poet's sight-as if
the writer's heart were clutching at each point in
the landscape, to pluck it back from the night, as a
patriotic heart would yearn to pluck back the country
from the threatened night of disgrace by foreign in-
sult tamely borne :
And all our land was thinking war;
I, too, with powerless hopes and hands,
Watched while each pale deliberate star
Struck this wet purple in the sands;
And felt, for each red boss of rock,
Now blackening as the night-time grows;
Each curve of these cliff-walls that lock
Our precious freedom from our foes;
For each small circuit traced by foam,
And marking England to my sight,
Each fringe and fragment of my home,
I could have wished to die to-night.'
The volume containing Lady Grace and the seve-
ral lyrics mentioned above (with a good deal beside)
certainly attracted a fair share of notice; but it is
remarkable that the educated heart and firm hand
84
OUR LIVING POETS.
shown here by the author should not have sooner
taken a hold on the public mind. Miss Smedley has
been putting forth volumes of tales for the last fifteen
years; and, partly from an utter scorn of anything
approaching sensationalism, partly from the want of
that sweep and freedom shown in Lady Grace, these
tales have not gained a very wide audience, though
the delicate truth and honesty of many of them entitle
them to one. Even a volume of poetry printed in
1863 has had no fair guerdon of notice, though its
excellence is unquestionable. This volume bears the
modest title, The Story of Queen Isabel, and other
Verses, by M. S., and it is acknowledged by Miss
Smedley in the title-page of her principal volume.
The Story of Queen Isabel is a poem of the idyllic
order of work, and is not so overgrown or so full of
beauties as the Idylls of the King. The heroine is
of course Isabella of Angoulême, the second wife of
King John; and her story is set before us with a
delicacy of thought and tenderness of touch rarely to
be met with. According to Hume, King John per-
suaded the Count of Angoulême to steal his daughter
away from the Count de la Marche, to whom she was
already married; but Miss Smedley has adopted a
version according to which Prince John persuades
Isabella herself to fly with him, while she is be-
trothed to the Count, and living under his roof ac-
cording to old custom. The poem gives an admirable
MENELLA BUTE SMEDLEY.
portrait of that despicable person King John, and a
fine sketch of the death of Richard I.; nor is there
any one poem in the book which the author need be
ashamed to acknowledge.
III.
JEAN INGELOW.
A little way, a very little way,
.... they dig into the rind;
And they are very sorry, soʻthey say,
Sorry for what they find.
JEAN INGELOW.
JEAN INGELOW.
I am not aware compilation on a mercantile su
I am not aware that any enterprising author has ever
undertaken the compilation of a biographical history
of literary popularity as gauged by mercantile success;
but, were such a work in existence, the phalanxed
follies exhibited in its pages would be something to
make the blood run cold, and turn sour that parti-
cular little measure of the milk of human kindness
which takes, in the critical bosom, the ambiguous
form of silent leniency.
It is quite certain that no amount of biographical
matter of this description which might be brought
together would ever afford material for a satisfactory
theory of popularity-or rather marketableness—in
literature; but one good result might arise from such
a compilation—no one would certainly ever be sur-
prised at the sale of any book of verses, however large
the sale, or however monstrous the folly of the book;
and as even agreeable surprises have their leaven of
disagreeableness, this state of things would on the
whole be desirable.
To any one who witnessed the success of Robert
Montgomery, there can be no ground for surprise in
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OUR LIVING POETS.
some contemporary successes which, if unprecedented,
would seem next to miraculous; but this exclusion
of surprise has no accompaniment of explanation,
any more than can be found for a multitude of mate-
rial facts that are found to recur regularly, “how or
why we don't understand.
We do not know—we have not the slightest idea
--why matters of commerce and finance in the City
are shuffled by a panic every ten years; but we ob-
serve that it is so. And similarly we do not at all
fathom the mystery of the public bestowing periodical
worship on some of the rushlights of literature mis-
taken for stars. Curiously enough too, equally-
worthless productions of this class frequently meet
with strikingly-unequal treatment;-a fact which
seems to support some vague and unpromulgated
theory of periodicity in the misdirection of public
favour. It is a fact worthy of observation, that the
poems' of Lord Houghton, for instance, are scarcely
mentioned at present-never were very much; while
those of Miss Ingelow, which are certainly not many
shades better, went through fourteen editions in five
years. If the lady's poetry is a shade or two better
than the lord's, it is not because there is more origin-
ality in it, or more individual merit. Whatever supe-
riority of quality there may seem to be is due simply
to the more successful assimilation of some of the
fine elements of other greater poetry. In Tennyson's
JEAN INGELOW.
91
Enoch Arden volume, it will be remembered, was a
little poem headed The Flower, aimed at the Lau-
reate's numerous imitators and their patrons. The
great master is never less great than when he at-
tempts this sort of thing, as witness the lines on a
spiteful Letter. However, the fable of The Flower
is considerably better than those lines: it has mean-
ing; and, such as it is, the meaning is true, though
rather small and personal for the utterance of a great
man. We all know how he tells us of his flower,
once called a weed, but afterwards crowned as a true
flower; how thieves stole the seed, and sowed it far
and wide ;' and how
Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed.
And some are pretty enough,
And some are poor indeed;
And now again the people
Call it but a weed.'
Whether he would pronounce Miss Ingelow's flowers
pretty enough' or 'poor indeed,' one cannot guess;
but some of them certainly do seem pretty enough,
though at the same time poor indeed because of
their unoriginality; and hence it seems a little un-
just on the part of Fate that, while writers of equal
merit or demerit fail to attract much attention,
this writer should be receiving a good deal of that
very substantial attention paid in purchasing one's
books.
R
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OUR LIVING POETS.
Miss Ingelow is one of those numerous writers
who, not having as a rule anything really worth say-
ing, somehow manage to make up parcels of vacuity
with enough of external mistiness to lead superficial
readers to the supposition that there is something
very recherché in the way of a kernel to this shell of
expression. To such superficial readers the idea that
a rich thought, easily appreciated by acute minds, lies
within an impenetrable garment of rhymes, acts as a
stimulant to praise. Many a silly person, who has
not the slightest idea of the meaning of anything but
the most superficial trash, will, for the sake of ap-
pearing wise, praise any misty nonsense in the way
of 'poetry;' and thus it is, probably, that among a
certain class and that a good large class) an idea has
been circulated that Miss Ingelow is a poetess of ex-
ceptional thoughtfulness. In truth she frequently
takes up some image or set of images, and works
through such a maze of variations that it is not
quite easy to follow her; and, while this method
of procedure induces many to give it up,' own-
ing inwardly their own stupidity, but outwardly
descanting on the deep thought of the poetess,-
while the enigma remains insoluble to some, other
some solve it, and find the answer to be not worth
the search.
We all know the story of the emperor's new
clothes, told by that wonderful Dane, Hans Christian
FEAN INGELOW.
93
Andersen—how certain impostors sent the emperor
out naked, under the assurance that they had pro-
vided him with the most exquisite garments, which
however could not be seen by any man who was either
a fool or unfit for his office. Of course the emperor
could not admit either proposition in regard to his
own august majesty, so forth he went. Of course no
one of the spectators could admit himself a fool or
unfit for the position he held in life; so every one
joined in the chorus of 0, how magnificent are the
emperor's new clothes !' till at last an innocent child,
with that peculiarly awkward unguardedness which
childhood still exhibits at times, “let loose his opi-
nion' that the emperor was devoid of raiment; and at
last this fact became universally recognised. So we
trust may the imagined depth of Miss Ingelow's sig-
nificances be eventually recognised by every one as
fictitious, when some unsophisticated voice shall have
sufficiently spoiled of its terrors the idea of confessing
that one sees nothing in the verses in which one's
neighbours profess to see stupendous merit and next-
to-unfathomable depth.
But the poetess does not always put on these
misty coverings to her verses. Very often they are
sent forth as ' utterly naked and bare' as rhymes can
possibly be, without an attempt at anything be-
yond mere prose presentation of bald shallow matter.
Take, for instance, the dialogue passages of which
94
OUR LIVING POETS.
Supper at the Mill is mainly composed. Here is the
opening :
I.
• Mother. Well, Frances.
Tranccs.
Well, good mother, how are you?
M. I'm hearty, lass, but warm; the weather's warm :
I think 'tis mostly warm on market days.
I met with George behind the mill : said he,
"Mother, go in and rest awhile."
- Aye, do,
And stay to supper; put your basket down.
M. Why, now, it is not heavy?
F.
Willie, man,
Get up and kiss your Granny. Heavy, no!
Some call good churning luck; but, luck or skill,
Your butter mostly comes as firm and sweet
As if 'twas Christmas. So you sold it all ?'
SI
And so on.
Nothing could well be much more unlike poetry
than this. In some other pieces of this sort there
is the same attempted imitation of the most simple
style adopted by the Laureate in his idyllic pieces ;
but as for the freshness, the vigour, the gem-like
clearness of cut which we get in Tennyson at his
utmost simplicity, what shadow of them is there
here?
Miss Ingelov has written some pieces which
would have enraptured Wordsworth in his vulgarest
mood—when, that is to say, he had descended to
the deepest depths of that bathos he so often stooped
to, notwithstanding the soaring flights for which he
was adequately winged. In Scholar and Carpenter,
a good deal of which is mere imitation of Tennyson,
JEAN INGELOW95
T
U
.
we find this verse, of which Wordsworth might have
been proud had it occurred to him in some unhappy
moment:
6" For here," said he, "are bread and beer,
And meat enough to make good cheer;
Sir, eat with me, and have no fear,
For none upon my work depend,
Saving this child; and I may say
That I am rich, for every day
I put by somewhat; therefore stay,
And to such eating condescend." !
For such a solemn piece of commonplace as this it is
not easy to find a fitting pendant beyond the lowly
circuit of Wordsworth's lowest art, of which he was,
alas, too fond.
But Miss Ingelow is not entirely dependent on
Wordsworth for her successes in bathos. On the
contrary, some of her greatest achievements in that
line are peculiarly her own in a certain sense. In
Honour's ve get passages such as we should vainly
look for elsewhere. Honours is a poem in which
the little differences between science and revelation
are brought in for trial and discussion. Science, as
might be expected, is pooh-poohed as an upstart,
and bantered in slightly inelegant terms, such as
these three verses :
Then all goes wrong: the old foundations rock;
One scorns at him of old who gazed unshod;
One striking with a pickaxe thinks the shock
Shall move the seat of God.
OUR LIVING POETS.
A little way, a very little way
(Life is so short), they dig into the rind,
And they are very sorry, so they say,-
Sorry for what they find.
But truth is sacred—aye, and must be told:
There is a story long beloved of man;
We must forego it, for it will not hold-,
Nature had no such plan.'
Science can of course well afford to treat such
writing as a joke, and would not fall out with Miss
Ingelow if she pleases to amuse herself by writing
verses on a subject concerning which she seems to
have heard a piece of one side of the discussion; but
would it be too hard to suggest that it might have
been safer to defer the treatment of a polemical sub-
ject till she had thoroughly mastered the grammar of
her language? The two lines,
"Is there, O is there aught that such as Thou
Would'st take from such as I ?'
afford a sample of false concord, which the merest
friendliness would not hesitate to point out. It is
moreover just possible that some representative of
what Miss Ingelow grandiloquently sneers at as 'the
baby science, born but yesterday,' might find a flaw
in facts as here stated. Who ever heard of geologists
or other men of science displaying the miserable spirit
implied in the words,
They are very sorry, so they say,-
Sorry for what they find'?
On the contrary, men of science are usually very
FEAN INGELOW.
glad of whatever new truth they find. Science has
no object so much in view as the ascertainment of
the truth, be it what it may; and, far from indulging
in such hysterical stuff as Miss Ingelow credits her
with, rejoices more over one false opinion exploded
than over ninety-and-nine just opinions that need
no explosion. Science too could teach Miss Ingelow
a little of that reverence which is so largely deficient
in such writing as the verses last quoted and these
following:
The garden, O the garden, must it go,
Source of our hope and our most dear regret?
The ancient story, must it no more show
Hov man may win it yet?
And all upon the Titan child's decree,
The baby science, born but yesterday,
That in its rash unlearnèd infancy
With shells and stones at play,
And delving in the outworks of this world,
And little crevices that it could reach,
Discovered certain bones laid up, and furled
Under an ancient beach,
And other waifs that lay to its young mind
Some fathoms lower than they ought to lie ...
The large features of Science would never conde-
scend to a wrinkle of disturbance at this kind of
intrusion : it is only the critical outsider who must
claim from those who hold strictly orthodox' opinions
the same reverential indulgence for honest labourers
who unearth unpalatable truths, as Science herself,
through her highest exponents, shows to the opinions
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OUR LIVING POETS.
and creeds of men, not only when they are doubtful,
but when they are known to be false. Such reverence
we find thoroughly developed in every great poetic
mind; and this is peculiarly the case in Tennyson,
who frequently introduces scientific ideas with recti-
tude of thought, as well as grandeur and delicacy of
expression ; but to such of his partial imitators as
have, like Miss Ingelow, failed to qualify themselves
by deep thought, as he has evidently done, Science
is a mere bugbear. Such writers would do well to
leave subjects of this sort altogether untouched; for
to the weak and flabby order of mind fear of con-
tamination must always render the book of science
a 'sealed book.
Miss Ingelow's partisans doubtless flatter them-
selves and her that she has dropped down heavily'
on geology in this poem of Honours ; but it only
requires a very limited amount of acuteness to detect
the dropping as of the baked-apple order, followed
only by pulpy collapse; and they and she might find
an instructive lesson on the treatment of scientific
themes by unscientific poets in Miss Smedley's beau-
tiful Plea for Beauty.
The same irreverence which we have just men-
tioned as exhibited towards the scientific spirit of
the age undergoes a very different manifestation in
Miss Ingelow's most pretentious production, A Story
of Doom, in which the simple old record of the preach-
JEAN INGELOW.
ing of Noah before the Deluge is made the founda-
tion of a terribly tedious romance, in nine books of
the driest blank-verse that it ever entered into the
heart of man (or woman either) to conceive. There
is no reason at all why subjects coeval with this
should not be treated in modern verse; and Mrs.
Browning has shown us, in her Drama of Exile, how
much true magnificence of poetry may be introduced
into such a subject. Some of the speeches of Adam
and Satan in the Drama of Exile may stand beside
Milton without fear; for though they do not quite
rival the state of Milton as regards the technical
quality of the blank-verse, they often surpass him in
fire and fury of thought, and in true humanity of
feeling; and the Eve of the drama is perhaps a more
exquisite creation than the Eve of the epic. But
there is a huge gulf between Mrs. Browning and
Miss Ingelow: where the one lays on touches of ex-
quisite colour, and revivifies the fading tones of an
antique subject, the other paints but to smutch, and
resuscitates but to exhibit an ugly monstrosity in-
stead of a grand vital frame. Conceive the wife of
Noah, when informed by her lord of the probability
of a seafaring life, answering thus:
“Sir, I am much afraid: I would not hear
Of riding on the waters'!
Note too the lack of artistic propriety in painting
Methuselah as a peevish old man vowing implacable
Ιοο
OUR LIVING POETS.
100
AS
enmity to his God on account of the loss of certain
talking and blaspheming Saurians which he was used
to yoke to a car when he drove in state, and which
God commissioned his angels to pound the heads of
with stones! Conceive farther the hopeless state of
imagination which would depict Noah and his wife as
holding a discussion on the rectitude of a prevalent
practice of obtaining a race of pigmies by selective
breeding! Such a discussion we get among the gro-
tesque improprieties apparently meant as decorations
to the Story of Doom; and the practice is deprecated
by two 'grave old angels,' who were ' plain -some-
thing, no doubt, very different in all respects from
the image we are accustomed to associate with the
word ' angel.' The Satan too of this work is a poor
production. Instead of the fine conception of a subtle
but perverted intellectuality, we have a cringing,
cowering, weakly-plaintive dragon, without a vestige
of the resistent energy involved in the very notion of
a Satan, so splendidly developed both by Milton and
by Mrs. Browning.
But when all has been said that can be said
against the taste and style of this popular writer,
there still remains an amount of undiscussed work
that cannot fairly be passed by without a few words
in the reverse sense. That the author has shown
here and there a good lyric faculty of the literary or
uninspired order is unquestionable ; nor can it be
ZEAN INGELOWS
IOI
.
denied that she exhibited in her popular book a note-
worthy share of those affinities with external nature
that never fail to enrich tenfold poetry that is wealthy
in other respects. In dealing with the more simple
and obvious sentiments and emotions she showed a
farther aptitude; and these three features seemed
promising when first brought before the public. But
later work does not bear out the promise; and the
features in question have no sufficient prominence to
support a high literary standing. That they all exist
may be seen without going beyond the three poems
selected for censure. The lyric faculty is perhaps
best shown in the charming song, 'When sparrows
build, and leaves break forth' (in Supper at the Mill);
and it is traceable in Honours, though the best verses
of that poem show no more than a fair capacity to
reproduce the metre and style of Tennyson's Dream
of Fair Women. The first part of Scholar and Car-
penter is full of little tender thoughts on nature and
things living, and the last part has an admirably
simple pathos in the Carpenter's story of his life :
were it not for the faults already named and the con-
scious presence of The Two Voices in the preamble
of intended subtleties, the poem might be valuable.
Again, in a poem called Light and Shade, the beau-
tiful legend of Persephone is treated at once with
firmness of hand and nicety of lyric expression : these
qualities, indeed, are exceedingly remarkable in the
11
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102
OUR LIVING POETS.
IO2
piece, considering that it is evidently a study written
on a set subject (that given in the title); and the
ruin of so good a poem by the anti-classic vulgarity
of the opening verse is subject for more regret than
the vulgarest passages of Miss Ingelow's verse usually
inspire in the critical bosom. The wide disparity
between Miss Ingelow and Miss Smedley as followers
of Tennyson is striking: Miss Smedley has exquisite
taste, whether she be writing in an imitative or in an
original vein; and it is just the lack of that indis-
pensable quality that has gone farthest to ruin Miss
Ingelow's productions in both veins. It is to be
feared now that this will always be so. En
IV.
ROBERT BROWNING.
* From Browning some “ Pomegranate,” which, if cut deep down
the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.'
E. B. BROWNING.
· The Critics say that epics have died out
With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods--
I'll not believe it.'
E. B. BROWNING.
ROBERT BROWNING.
DURING the last thirty years men of science have
been notably active in accumulating results such as
have gone far to constitute a definite and invaluable
science of psychology : year after year has seen some
pinnacle or bastion added to the great edifice, and
year after year the admitted importance of this branch
of physiology has increased. Nowhere has the move-
ment been more vigorously forwarded than in Eng-
land, and in no other country is there so able an
array of really scientific psychologists. It would be
strange if there were no corresponding movement in
the world of art-science and art being as they are
so much more intimately connected than a mere
superficial view of them would lead one to suppose;
and for the artistic equivalent of this scientific move-
ment we should naturally look first to the head of the
arts ; nor will he who looks there be disappointed.
Whoever has followed out the history of poetry dur-
ing the last thirty years must have observed a great
change in the subjects selected for treatment, as
well as in the manner of treating them. The entity
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OUR LIVING POETS.
nature,' which before the present era of poetry
absorbed so large a proportion of our esthetic ener-
gies, has in its turn been absorbed by the real be-
ing, man; and the great bulk of poetic force is now
brought to bear on the treatment of man, and of
man alone,for whatever our poets now find to say
about inanimate nature is not apostrophic, but has
reference to nature merely in its bearings on man.
Under these auspices the psychological school of poetry
has been and is forming — having for many years
consisted of the great master whose name heads this
section and of dispersed results of his influence
on many younger or lesser poets; for up to a com-
paratively recent time he alone devoted himself en-
tirely to the admirable method of his own creation.
Tennyson, as we have seen, has used the method at
times, and always with fine results; but he has had
too much work of another class to attend to to make
his works in this kind of capital importance.
Browning, throughout his literary career, has
applied strictly psychological principles both to the
drama and to lyric poetry; and, until the wonderful
application of those principles to work on an epic
scale—the feat he last performed-his chief innova-
tion lay in the construction of pieces which cannot
properly be called lyrics, though often lyrical in metre.
This innovation consisted chiefly in the confining of
poetry entirely to the motions of the human soul,
0
ROBERT BROWNINGTT 2
107
.
and treating these with an unprecedented minute-
ness and carefulness of analysis, and with a special
care to the adaptation of metre and rhythm to the
exigencies of each subject. In the longer pieces,
which are written in lyrical metres or blank verse,
according to the subject, there is a large and what
must be called greatly dramatic use of the monologue
form. In each monologue some particular point of
interest in the history of a human soul is taken up.
The soul, whether historical or fictitious, generally
speaks for itself all that is spoken—the artist in-
variably refraining from any appearance as a spokes-
man. In the course of the monologue all circum-
stances in the past development of the soul, which
are available for illuminating the present point, are
brought out, and the present and past action of other
human beings on the speaker is indicated either by
detail on the speaker's part, or by some such artifice
as a sudden change in the tone of the monologue,
from which we learn that the person addressed has
said or done something; and sometimes the whole
expression of the actual speaker is devoted to the
analysis of another soul—the idealised reproduction
of another character, or set of mental phenomena.
This method of course affords a great compactness
and symmetry to the series of circumstances relating
to the particular mind under treatment; and the
attention of the reader is to a large extent concen-
108
OUR LIVING POETS.
trated on that one soul, though it is quite possible
to treat a plurality of souls ably in one monologue.
Now in Pauline, the poet's earliest known work,
published anonymously, and called ' a fragment of
a confession,' this principle is strictly adhered to;
but the growth of the speaker's soul, and the various
phases of sentiment and thought through which he
has passed, are given at far too great a length to
be thoroughly impressive: the texture is not close
enough, and the poem is otherwise wanting in sub-
sequently developed characteristics of Browning.
Nevertheless it is a beautiful piece, and for a first
attempt very powerful. Through all the long tale
which the speaker tells to Pauline, we get no irre-
levancies, no ruptures of unity, nothing to give the
idea of a 'made-up' poem; but there is an over-evi-
dent influence of Shelley apparent in the style here
and there, and the speaker often addresses some
worshipped poet whom he calls “Sun-treader,' and
who seems to bear, in certain sketchy passages re-
lating to him, a strong resemblance to Shelley ;--SO
that, while one cannot but see a complete dramatic
unity in the piece, an idea (perhaps a wild one) occa-
sionally suggests itself, that the poet, elsewhere wor-
shipful to Shelley, is dramatising himself-making
his own confession and diverging into addresses to
his own idol. If this were so, the fact would not
render the piece anything other than a psychological
ROBERT BROWNING.
109
monologue: Browning's soul is quite as well worth
analysing and dramatising as any soul he has taken
up and sunk himself in; but what gives Pauline an
air of improbability, as a dramatic piece, is the great
minuteness of treatment--the particularity of psy-
chical detail as compared with the breadth and gene-
rality of more mature works. Doubtless the piece
was soon felt to be a failure by the rapidly growing
intellect that had put it forth, and the next produc-
tion was executed on a much easier plan, though it
was still more ambitiously exhaustive ; Paracelsus
was devoted to the treatment of one soul equally
with Pauline ; but the end was compassed by means
of open converse with other souls; and, though Para-
celsus is the one theme, the other three characters of
this dramatic poem are vital and interesting. After
Paracelsus came a manifestation of analytical power
in the five-act-drama form-Strafford; and then, in
Sordello, a different method again was put to proof
-the analytic narrative. In point of method no im-
portance can be attached to Sordello; but the book
is full enough of exquisite beauties and nice discri-
minations of the elements of character to support a
considerable essay; and there is in it a luxuriant
wealth of sonorous expression, suggestive of joy in a
newly-discovered faculty. It is to be noted on the
way that the Shelley flavour goes through Paracelsus
and comes out with great strength in Sordello, rein-
U
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POETS.
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OUR LIVING TIT
111
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vigorated by the magnificent originality of style de-
veloped by Browning in the mean time. In Pippa
Passes, the very curious but very beautiful drama
which came out next, there was a looming of mono-
logue on a better plan than that of Pauline; but it
was in the poet's next instalment of work that the
conception of this form was first carried out in its
integrity-in the piece then called Italy, but long
ago re-christened My Last Duchess. In this piece,
not only do we get a marvellously graphic portrait of
an Italian ducal mind drawn by the duke's self, but
the whole action and scenery are reflected from his
speech as clearly as if the monologue were furnished
with introduction, notes, and appendix. As we read
the opening words
* That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now'—
we see the nobleman, with indicative wave of hand,
conduct his guest on to the fancied stage; and not
less significant are the terminal lines-
Will't please you rise? Wo'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed ;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me.'
ROBERT BROWNINGn
III
.
We see here at once the whole situation-how the
Duke, showing the portrait of his late wife, is enter-
taining the emissary of his next wife's father: we
see the pair rise, and in the 'Nay, we'll go together
down, sir,' we see the courtly contention at the stair-
head; and then we have the lingering descent of the
stairs the look-out of the window at the bronze in
the palace court.
The collection of Bells and Pomegranates which
contained this piece contained many others of the
same integrity of method, though in some there is
a greater preponderance of narrative element than we
associate with the pure conception of the psychological
monologue. Still the pieces containing this different
distribution of elements do not depart in any sense
from the method in question : some go back upon old
reminiscence, and are thus more narrative in matter,
while others are full of the actual situation, and are
thus more dramatic in the ordinary acceptation of the
word; but, forasmuch as in all to which I refer the
artist has obviously performed the difficult task of
self-elimination, all are dramatic; and inasmuch as
the whole* are character-studies, whether of phases
intellectual or phases emotional, all are strictly psy-
chological. Almost every piece is a speech spoken
from a single mouth.
* The most striking exception is the Pied Piper of Hamelin,
perhaps the best known but least worth knowing of all Browning's
poems.
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OUR LIVING POETS.
UU
Three years later, another relay of Bells and
Pomegranates furnished a still richer sample of the
capacities of the monologue form-even the com-
mencement of the supreme poem Saul appearing
among the rest. Since that time (1845), Browning
has published no considerable works that are not in
the monologue form, except A Soul's Tragedy, Luria,
and In a Balcony. This last was the only very not-
able exception to the method in the collection of fifty
poems called originally Men and Women, unless we
are also to except the tiro great poems which are
letters — Karshish and Cleon; and these are so
thoroughly dramatic that it is unnecessary to except
them. Luria and In a Balcony are perhaps the most
perfect of Browning's plays, though neither is well
adapted for modern stage purposes; and, after making
the dramatic scene-form yield what it would in his
hands to the enrichment of psychological art, the poet
seems to have followed out with a striking unity of
purpose the elaboration of his own peculiar mono-
logue. Even Christmas Eve and Easter Day,* pub-
lished five years earlier than the last play, is no
exception; for it must be regarded as impersonal,
just as the other religious monologues of Browning
are impersonal. There may be a bias in it; but if
there is it is not self-evident; and we could no more
confidently attribute to Browning the position as-
* A poem in two monologues, with a large narrative element.
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113
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no
sumed by either of the two speakers in Christmas
Eve and Easter Day than we could label him Roman
Catholic on the strength of Bishop Blougram's Apo-
logy, Arabian sceptic on the evidence of the Letter
from Karshish, or Pagan on the testimony of Cleon.
In Dramatis Persona, published nine years later
than Men and Women, the dramatic form had en-
tirely disappeared, and the book was simply a collec-
tion of monologues full of fresh variety in form, while
in matter it was, as all its predecessors had been, a
rich contribution of deep original thoughts and beau-
tiful feelings infused into the pictured mental lives
of so many more men and women, “live or dead, or
fashioned by the fancy' of the poet. And at length
this series of labours in one direction has been
crowned with that achievement which the commence-
ment of the year 1869 saw completed— The Ring and
the Book, a work in twelve psychological monologues,
constituting not only a poem of the highest power
and noblest aspiration, but also a great lesson on
the adaptability of the strict monologue form for epic
uses.
I believe there are many persons under the im-
pression that these soul-studies of Browning's are
for the most part verse of a purely intellectual class;
but this is a great mistake; for, although subtlety
of thought and keenness of intellect abound among
the men and women of this poet's creation, a fervent
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OUR LIVING POETS.
intensity in the emotional side of the human nature
here depicted is almost more remarkable than the
rarity of the intellectual atmosphere. And it is the
emotional rather than the intellectual qualities that
render Browning's Men and Women and Dramatis
Personæ the vital and perspicuous personalities that
they are. They are beings of broadly-marked cha-
racter, who, when once known, draw the reader to
them in bonds of affection as Shakespeare's characters
do; and the many remarkable thoughts they suggest
to you in detail are not really as remarkable as the
varied personalities themselves.
It is hard to tell which of these so many mono-
logue-portraits are the best and most memorable ;
but it is perhaps safe to say that, of the historic
characters in this method, the two master-pieces are
portraits of two Italian painters-Fra Lippo Lippi
and Andrea del Sarto; and both these poems are
notable instances of what is said above in regard to
the relative value of thoughts and personalities: both
teem with fine thoughts on art and life; but, when
one has laid these to heart and truly enjoyed them,
it is, after all, the two painters themselves with whom
one is brought into close contact, and who remain as
firmly impressed on the heart and mind as persons
met and loved in real life.
On near acquaintance with the poem Fra Lippo,
it is impossible not to feel that the reading of the
ROBERT BROWNINGYXY T2
115
.
monk's character for which Browning has reached
across the centuries is absolutely true in essentials.
What we are usually taught to remember about this
painter is simply that he broke his monastic vows
and ran away with a nun (or novice); but what is
really memorable about this rebellious monk is doubt-
less his intense feeling for the beauty and meaning
of objective phenomena, and his love for human na-
ture independent of what is fantastically spiritual in
the conceptions of his time. Thus, Browning gives
us the portrait of the man for whom
• The world and life's too big to pass for a dream-
the man whose mind is in advance of narrow monastic
conceptions, and who, monk though he be, roundly
confesses,
For me, I think I speak as I was taught-
I always see the Garden and God there
A-making man's wife-and, my lesson learned,
The value and significance of flesh,
I can't unlearn ten minutes aftcrwards.'
This appreciation of the value and significance of
flesh' - so clearly evinced in the splendidly solid
and vivid work of Lippo when placed beside the thin
and ultra-spiritual pictures of his contemporaries—is
no mark of mere grossness: it is really an earnest of
the man's genial interest in human faces and forms,
-an interest whereof the poet has given a masterly
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OUR LIVING POETS.
specimen in a question put by his Frate to the func-
tionary who has caught him out of bounds,
Have you noticed, now,
Your cullion's hanging face? A bit of chalk,
And trust me but you should, though!'
Lippo and some few such as he are just the men who
may fairly say,
This world's no blot for us,
Nor blank-it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.'
And such spirits are not to be ranked meanly just
because they may have followed their inevitable course
in transgressing the narrow limits of conventual exist-
ence.
In Andrea del Sarto the sense of perfect mastery
over the art of painting is rendered as finely as is in
Fra Lippo Lippi the sense of strong struggle and
development of an art very imperfect; and the cha-
racter-one radically opposed to the Friar in most
essentials—is given with even a greater completeness
than is shown in the reproduction of the Friar's cha-
racter. If we love the strong, genial, humane Lippo,
we cannot well love less the sensitive, tender-hearted,
fragile Andrea—the man whose heart harboured con-
ceptions of the most exquisite, whose hand embodied
them with a perfect mastery; and who yet had not
the strong self-sufficiency needed for any man who is
to climb among the highest peaks of the art-world.
It is easy to understand how a man whose concep-
VIT.
Y IUL
ROBERT BROWNINGTY
117
.
tions were of the subtle and delicate beauty charac-
teristic of Andrea's works should have been tied down
to a lower place than was possible to him, simply by
the power of an 'imperious whorish woman' to whose
beauty he was a slave,—how the influence of such a
woman might lead him to make his art a mere means
of money-getting, to break his faith, rob his patron,
and even put up with such half-love as he was able
to extort from her. There is something unspeakably
sad (and true in its sadness) in that passage of
Browning's poem where Andrea compares himself
with Raphael, and half reproaches the insatiate Lu-
crezia with her failure to influence him aright:
Yonder's a work, now, of that famous youth
The Urbinate who died five years ago.
('Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me.)
Well, I can fancy how he did it all,
Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see,
Reaching, that Heaven might so replenish him,
Above and through his art—for it gives way;
That arm is wrongly put—and there again,
A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines,
Its body, so to speak! its soul is right,
He means right—that, a child may understand.
Still, what an arm ! and I could alter it.
But all the play, the insight and the stretch-
Out of me! out of me! And wherefore out?
Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul,
We might have risen to Rafael, I and you.'
At this point in the monologue we get one of those
admirable turns of speech implying the presence of
the person addressed; for here Andrea changes his
118
POETS.
T
OUR LIVING tone to one of deprecation, and it is implied that
his wife has answered him with pique: he goes on-
"Nay, Love, you did give all I asked, I think-
More than I merit, yes, by many times.
But had you-oh, with the same perfect brow,
And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth,
And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird
The fowler's pipe, and follows to the snarem
Had you, with these the same, but brought a mind!
Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged
“ God and the glory! never care for gain.
The present by the future, what is that?
Live for fame, side by side with Angelo-
Rafael is waiting. Up to God all three !".
I might have done it for you. So it seems-
Perhaps not. All is as God over-rules.'
All this is exceedingly characteristic; and the last
weakness of putting one's faults and failures down to
God is specially appropriate as an imputation against
poor Andrea.
I am not aware that any one has noticed publicly
the striking correspondence between the character of
Andrea as condensed into this verbal portrait, and
the external semblance of the painter as shown by
himself in that triumph of art, his own portrait, pre-
served in the National Gallery. But to me it seems
impossible to think of the poem and the picture
apart; so completely do they unite to form one per-
sonality. The spiritual beauty of the brow and eyes,
with their look of care and depression, the grand
capacity of the head, the delicate weakness of the
cloven chin, the sensuousness of the mouth, the
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119
.
a
might of the firm large hands, the perceptibly sordid
stoop of the noble neck, the exquisitely refined taste
of the costume’s colour and form, and the wholly
craftsmanlike moulding of all these traits into a per-
fect picture, speak so distinctly of the soul that utters
its own portrait in the monologue, that one is dis-
posed to suspect the poet must have known the pic-
ture when he and it were both inmates of Florence.
The point is an interesting one; for of all the poet's
monologues this of the faultless painter' is perhaps
the most nearly faultless, and of all portraits that
artists have left us of themselves none is more
touching or exquisite than Andrea's in the National
Gallery : nor is it strange that while the poet's work
remains in the mind with the material colouring of
the painter's, the painter's inevitably suggests the
psychical colouring of the poet's.
The catholic sympathy shown in reproducing
with equal vividness two lives so alien in the art-
world as these two never fails the poet when he goes
out of himself into the world of religious and philo-
sophic sentiment and thought. Whether his speaker
be the Roman -catholic bishop who finds it conve-
nient to remain in the faith, and justifies himself to
himself with sophistic satisfaction, or the Arabian
physician who, struck almost to conviction by the
tale of Lazarus, yet writes of it to his fellow practi-
tioner as a 'crazy tale,' interesting when probed by
2
I 20
OUR LIVING POETS.
CD
medical insight, there is the same completeness of
characterisation, arising from perfect identification
with the character. Whether he places himself at
the standpoint of the Greek artist, poet, and philo-
sopher who writes to his tyrant dismissing the pre-
tensions of Paul and his followers with all the aristo-
cracy of intellect and cultivation, or becomes for the
nonce the dying Evangelist John, there is the same
distinct human value attaching itself to the one set
of thoughts as to the other. And while in Saul the
young enthusiast David is represented as conceiving
originally the two sublime ideas of future existence
for the soul and redemption by the Son of God made
flesh, an opposite extreme is reached in Caliban upon
Setebos, when the 'moon-calſ' delivers his splendid
theological scheme, and ends his gross conceptions
in natural theology' by grovelling in terror at an
approaching storm. In all these cases, and in fact
in every other instance in which the poet has touched
the various-toned strings of religious thought, the
particular ideas are not merely set in order but inti-
mately felt; and the main outcome is always a solid
personality: the reasonings pass out of the mind,
but the men remain fixed there ; and what is of the
utmost importance in appraising this poetry is that
the same is true of the men and women who are made
the vehicles of the simpler phases of sentiment and
passion. Porphyria's Lover sitting by his murdered
ROBERT BROWNING.
I 21
mistress, telling the tale of his great love and terrible
cure for doubt, is no less a man than that Cleon who
could say with arrogant truth that all arts' were his,
and who had
written three books on the soul,
Proving absurd all written hitherto,
And putting us to ignorance again ;'
and 'James Lee's' neglected wife, with her 'coarse
hanks of hair,' is neither more nor less vital and
interesting than Abt Vogler after he had been
extemporising upon the musical instrument of his
invention,' and has paused to deliver his soul of an
exquisite burden of thought on music.
It was long the fashion among the shallower
critics' of the day to lose no available opportunity
for a gird at the darknesses of Sordello and the dry-
nesses of Paracelsus, works which none the less will
remain high in sight long after the world has let slip
the remembrance that the nineteenth century boasted
a race of critics' so blind as to think slightly of the
profoundest contemporary poetic intellect. Even after
it became heterodox to sneer openly at these poems,
the shortness of the poet's best-known works served
as a stand-point for detractors; but that stand-point
was finally abolished by The Ring and the Book. It is
true there were remarks here and there on the 'awk-
wardness," ungainliness,' &c. of the form; but we
are not likely to hear more of this. It is doubtless
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OUR LIVING POETS.
I 22
here that the poet has produced his chef-d'oeuvre as
regards both might of conception and form of embo-
diment: we have already followed the lines in which
the form of the psychological epic has grown up
from that of the monologue; and, having seen some-
thing of the difficulty and excellence of the mono-
logue form, we can estimate to some extent the
magnitude of Browning's achievement in producing
The Ring and the Book. For in this undertaking
he did not content himself with merging his person-
ality in a single soul; but finding a subject rich in
characters, in vivid variety of life, in complex mental
phenomena to explore at will, he wove for us a series
of monologues, each perfectly stable by itself and clear
as to its own speaker and situation, and yet all so
firmly welded together as to be an indivisible unity.
The book is replete with the finest qualities of former
works by the same hand (except the lark-like singing
of Sordello, which but rarely comes uppermost here);
and no estimate of Browning's works could be any-
thing but the most incomplete without a somewhat
full account of this latest and greatest of them. Let
us therefore look at the general scheme of the book,
its material and origin, and such of the individual
sections as seem most important.
First of all, a word or two about the title may not
be out of place. This must not be deemed fantastic,
as resting on the mere image of a goldsmith making
ROBERT BROWNING.
123
a work of smithcraft out of pure gold, by transfusion
of the metal with alloy, and fitting it
"To bear the file's tooth and the hammer's tap:
Since hammer needs must widen out the round,
And file emboss it fine with lily-flowers,
Ere the stuff grow a ring-thing right to wear.'
It is necessary to look behind this image for the true
significance of the title, and to consult the inscrip-
tion which grateful Florence placed on Casa Guidi,
in memory of the former inmate Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, who made, in the words of the inscription,
del suo verso aureo anello fra Italia e Inghilterra.'
From the gold of this old Roman murder-case Brown-
ing has made a ring, which he aspires to place as
strengthening the former tie between England and
Italy -- adding another bond to the sympathies so
often and so strongly awakened by the poetess with
fiery bursts of lyric poetry. The expression of this
aspiration closes The Ring and the Book:
11
"And save the soul! If this intent save mine,
If the rough ore be rounded to a ring,
Render all duty which good ring should do,
And, failing grace, succeed in guardianship,
Might mine but lie outside thine, Lyric Love,
Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised)
Linking our England to his Italy !!
In the first book the poet tells us how he found
one day on a stall, while walking through Florence,
an 'old square yellow book of printed and written
documents, relating to the trial of a Count Guido
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OUR LIVING POETS.
Franceschini' and certain four, the cut-throats in his
pay, for the murder of his wife Pompilia with her
putative parents Pietro and Violante Comparini: he
tells how he sought and failed to find other records
of the trial, and how, finding that all trace of what
had once been bruited widely over Europe had clean
gone from the minds of men, he determined to 'let
this old woe step on the stage again,' because, as he
says, in digging out the sense of the book bit by
bit (for it was partly in bad Latin, though partly in
Italian), he had 'assayed and knew his piecemeal
gain was gold. The foundation of fact found in this
old book is not long to narrate, being simply what is
chronicled about the trial. The main facts not dis-
puted are--that Guido married Pompilia at Rome,
and took her home to his palace at Arezzo, with her
putative parents, the Comparini-that the Comparini
left Arezzo and returned to Rome--that after a while
Pompilia followed them to Rome in the company of
a young priest, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, and there
gave birth to a child--that Guido then came to Rome
with four accomplices and murdered both wife and
parents-in-law—that thereon ensued the trial whereof
the sole record is this ! old square yellow book'—that
an appeal was made to the Pope after condemnation
of the murderers by the civil court, and that, on the
Pope's judgment in the same sense being given, the
murderers were-
ROBERT BROWNING.
125
put to death
By heading or hanging as befitted ranks,
At Rome on February Twenty Two,
Since our salvation Sixteen Ninety Eight.'
The allegations made on Guido's side are—that
the Comparini palmed off upon the Count a girl not
their own at all, but purchased by Violante from a
prostitute in Rome — that, being discontented with
the life at Arezzo, they returned to Rome and pub-
lished this infamous transaction, partly out of spite,
and partly to avoid payment of dowry—that Pompilia
had held adulterous converse with the priest at Arezzo,
and that finally, drugging Guido and his household,
and laying hands on whatsoever property came near-
est, she eloped with the priest, and gave birth eight
months later to his child. For this catalogue of
crimes, say Guido and his friends, the three lives
were made to expiate, to the satisfaction of wounded
honour.
The assertions on the other side are—that Guido
obtained Pompilia and dowry on false representation
of his bien-être, inducing the Comparini to come to
Arezzo on the same representation that when there
he did his worst to worry the old couple to death,
and exhibited an unmitigated hate for the young
Pompilia—that he tried all he could to involve his
wife with the priest-that she did use the said priest's
services to make good her flight, out of pure fear of
the Count's brutalities, and without any fault what-
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POETS.
TY
OUR LIVING ever on her part—and that Guido committed the
murder only when he felt that he might gratify his
hate without prejudice to his monetary prospects,
namely, when Pompilia liad an heir to whom the
property of the Comparini would descend, and who
would be under his power. “This,' we are told,
is the bookful; thus far take the truth,
The untempered gold, the fact untampered with,
The mere ring-metal ere the ring be made !'
The poet's next step in his prelusive address to
the public is to recount how, closing the book, he
proceeded to realise the whole tragedy from first to
last - to fuse his “live soul with that inert stuff;'
and for power of diction and vividness of feeling there
is scarcely a finer passage in the work than this
wherein we learn how, after the meagre black and
white of the trial had been duly conned, the tragedy
presented itself in fulness of form and richness of
colour and amplitude of detail to a mind foremost
among our poetic minds at this time in knowledge of
the human heart and of human motive. A compari-
son of what Browning calls 'the bookful' with what
he realises after he has shut the book will yield some
notion of the power of a pure and noble fancy; and
no doubt the dramatic account given of the gene-
sis of this poem really represents the process of
transfiguration from bare fact to artistic fiction (or
whatever you please to call the result). The story
ROBERT BROWNING.
127
gathered from the old book, as it stands with its
rags and tatters of human frailty obtruded every-
where, would scarcely be deemed edifying: it is only
when the poet has pared off the rags and tatters, and
brought forward the truths and treasures which only
eyes such as his have power to discern beneath, that
Beauty comes with edification in her train. Fact
alone is often gross and unedifying; but fact with
fancy may be, and in the hands of a great poet must
be, quite the reverse, insomuch as to justify Brown-
ing's own dictum-
'Fancy with fact is just one fact the more;
To-wit, that fancy has informed, transpierced,
Thridded and so thrown fast the facts else free,
As right through ring and ring runs the djereed
And binds the loose, one bar without a break.'
Next to the account of the realisation of the facts
by his own powers of fancy, we get a brief reasoned
analysis of the whole tragedy, as conceived by the
poet—the view of the matter which he sees good rea-
son for selecting from among the conflicting views
shown in the bare book.
After describing the germ of the poem in its
growth from fact to art, he tells us how he means to
put the whole before us-enumerates the ten speeches
which, with his own prologue and epilogue, are to
'round the ring,' and places the speakers before us
as fleshly as art can place, with their surroundings.
The mere arrangement of these monologues is strik-
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OUR LIVING POETS.
ingly strong and effective. First is the speech of a
citizen representing that half of contemporary Rome
which sympathises with the Count; and next speaks
he who represents the other half Rome,' convinced
of the blamelessness of Pompilia and the infamy of
Guido: these two speeches show one-sided strong
feeling, but no niceness of reasoning; while the third
book is a discriminative discussion of the matter on
neutral grounds, spoken by a 'person of quality,' re-
presenting the class
Who care to sift a business to the bran,
Nor coarsely bolt it like the simpler sort.'
Then come in succession Guido's defence made up
of lies, with Caponsacchi's and Pompilia's statements
made up of truth; next, the first lawyer-pleading for
Guido, and the last against him; then the Pope's
debate with his own soul, resulting in the judgment
against the murderers ; and lastly Guido's speech
after he has heard the doom--speech wherein he
tells no more lies, but gives us the naked hideous
truth.
In this introductory book, then, the poet drama-
tises his own dramatic mind, and the situation taken
up is the genesis of a great dramatic work. Through-
out this book the figure prominently before us is
Browning-Browning as he draws his subject to him,
and thrusts it at arm's-length again -- Browning as
he dives through what would be mud to a muddy
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129
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D
mind, and brings up, by help of his clear vision, all
the hidden beauties to be found in any complex human
subject—Browning as he revels in his art and in his
power as a medium between contemporary humanity
and the lost treasures of human grief and passion
and splendour of devotion, which he deems he has
found in the records of this forgotten case. Not on
a first reading is it fully apparent that the poet has
handled his own soul in so splendid a manner, and
embodied it in such a graphic and speaking legacy to
posterity ; but whoever takes the trouble to dwell a
little with this first division of The Ring and the
Book will probably find that we have here a revela-
tion of the poet as man and artist, such as it were
well to possess of all great poets—such as we have
not even of our great, grand, impersonal Shakespeare.
I repeat' as man and artist,' because it seems certain
that no sympathetic soul could fail, on due attention,
to feel to the utmost depth the strength, purity, and
manliness of the whole—the strong pathos of the
poet's outbreathings which relate to his own life, and
the entire absence from them of anything morbid,
such as one generally finds in personal verse. Brown-
ing has often a grotesque way of putting things, clearly
not intended as in any way comical, but part and
parcel of his style, and not incompatible with serious-
ness, or even pathos; and in the three passages in
which he speaks openly to his countrymen, address-
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OUR LIVING POETS.
ing them as ‘British Public,' we cannot but feel the
oddness of his expressions as the artifice of a strong
soul to hide a pain which might be thought maudlin
if expressed in anything but language the most mus-
cular--a pain at the comparative neglect wherein his
works lay for many years. It would be absurd for a
man of superb abilities to affect ignorance of them;
and, feeling them, it would be equally absurd to pro-
fess indifference whether they are recognised; and
there is a profound pathos combined with a healthy
independence of tone in these personal passages ad-
dressed to the British public by one whose habit of
writing is entirely impersonal. At the end of the
introductory book one of these passages is linked
with an address to his poet-wife — than which it
would be hard to find anything more beautiful or
more touching :
Such, British Public, ye who like me not,
(God love you !)—whom I yet have laboured for,
Perchance more careful whoso runs may read
Than erst when all, it seemed, could read who ran,-
Perchance more careless whoso reads may praise.
Than late when he who praised and read and wrote
Was apt to find himself the self-same me, --
Such labour had such issue, so I wrought
This arc, by furtherance of such alloy,
And so, by one spirt, take away its trace
Till, justifiably golden, rounds my ring.
A ring without a posy, and that ring mine?
O lyric lore, half-angel and half-bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire,
Boldest of hearts that ever brated the sun,
ROBERT BROWNING131
Y
TO
.
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang & kindred soul out to his face,-
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart-
When the first summons from the darkling earth
Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,
And bared them of the glory-to drop down,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die,-
This is the same voice : can thy soul know change?
Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!
Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except with bent head and beseeching hand-
That still, despite the distance and the dark,
What was, again may be ; some interchange
Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile:
—Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
Their utmost up and on, -80 blessing back
In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!
To say which of the twelve books of this poem is
the most perfect in depth and breadth of dramatic
conception or in mastery over the peculiar form of
dramatic expression—which shows the deepest in-
sight into the human heart or the highest powers of
imagination-would be a hard matter ; but it is not
difficult to separate the monologues of primary im-
portance from those to be regarded as accessory. The
principal ones beside this introductory one of the
poet's own are those of the actors in the tragedy and
that of Pope Innocent XII., on whose judgment the
murderers were put to death. The opposed outpour-
ings of divided unreasoning Rome with the critical
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OUR LIVING POETS.
analysis of reasoning Rome, as well as the special-
pleadings of the men of law, and the comparatively
slight epilogue, are of secondary importance.
The first of the main characters who addresses us
in person is Count Guido Franceschini, as he appears
before the judges and stands on his defence. No
clownish, dull-witted piece of mere brutality is this
Count, but a clear-headed man of the world, far above
the average in abilities—a man who lives and has
lived for the world,' in the conventional acceptation
of that term, and whose ideas all centre round worldly
advantage-a man to whose heart religion is unknown
in any form, but whose intellect has yet appraised
and considered it in many forms, and finally cast it
out, choosing that worse part which he is never able
to make as entirely his own as he would wish. He
is before all things mean-hearted—unsympathetic to
the point of cruel cynicism : narrow-minded he can-
not in any sense be called; and his acuteness of in-
tellect, coupled with a wide knowledge of the ways of
the world, enables him to place his conduct before
his judges in a startlingly different light from that
which we feel to be the true light. The one thing he
respects is his own long line of ancestry; and even
here his respect is in proportion probably to the
amount of advantage a long line of ancestry gives a
man in contact with his fellows. He professes to
regard the marital contract with Pompilia as a simple
IS
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133
mercantile transaction, in which he traded his rank
and position for so much youth, beauty, and money ;
and in the mouth of such a man such a profession
affords a plausible foundation from which to build
the grievances erected in his defence; nevertheless,
throughout this defence the reader's heart is firm in
the faith that, for all the muscular grasp of the man
on each trait convertible to his uses, the fair fame of
Pompilia and the priest is not suffering in the judges'
eyes. Through all the wily fluency of the Count-
through all his rhetorical flashes of wounded honour
and manhood--through even his occasional outpour-
ings of argument based on religion, we discern the
serpentine subtlety of that unrivalled piece of spe-
cious falsity, a heartless and unprincipled Italian of
intellect. Whether flowers of rhetoric deck the speech
or breaths of humanitarian or devout sentiment ex-
pire from it, there leers the serpent's eye or hisses
the serpent's tongue. The man is put so vividly
before us, not only here in his own speech but also
in dashing touches of Browning's speech, that we
cannot but feel his utter falsity and ineradicable
cruelty, even through passages of superb poetry, such
as the account of his waiting at Rome before the
murder :
Festive bells everywhere the Feast o' the Babe,
Joy upon earth, peace and goodwill to man!
I am baptised. I started and let drop
The dagger. “Where is it, His promised peace ?”
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OUR LIVING POETS.
Nine days o' the Birth-Feast did I pause and pray
To enter into no temptation more.
I bore the hateful house, my brother's once,
Deserted, let the ghost of social joy
Mock and make mouths at me from empty room
And idle door that missed the master's step,
Bore the frank wonder of incredulous eyes,
As my own people watched without a word,
Waited, from where they huddled round the hearth
Black like all else, that nod so slow to come
I stopped my ears even to the inner call
Of the dread duty, heard only the song
“Peace upon earth," saw nothing but the face
O'the Holy Infant and the halo there
Able to cover yet another face
Behind it, Satan's, which I else should see.
But, day by day, joy waned and withered off:
The Babe's face, premature with peak and pine,
Sank into wrinkled ruinous old age,
Suffering and death, then mist-like disappeared,
And showed only the Cross at end of all,
Left nothing more to interpose 'twixt me
And the dread duty,—for the angels' song,
“Peace upon earth,” louder and louder pealed,
“O Lord, how long, how long be unavenged ?"?
was fora
Exquisite as this is, it is almost surpassed by the
magnificent fury of what follows when the Count tells
of his arrival at the villa of the Comparini, certain,
as he says, of nothing save the will to do right, and
the daring aught save leave right undone,'-tells of
his unbridled wrath when Violante opens the door to
him :
And then,—why, even then, I think,
I' the minute that confirmed my worst of fears,
Surely,-I pray God that I think aright!
Had but Pompilia's self, the tender thing
Who once was good and pure, was once my lamb
And lay in my bosom, had the well-known shape
Fronted me in the door-way,-stood there faint
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135
.
With the recent pang, perhaps, of giving birth
To what might, though by miracle, seem my child,
Nay more, I will say, had even the aged fool
Pietro, the dotard, in whom folly and age
Wrought, more than enmity or malevolence,
To practise and conspire against my peace,
Had either of these but opened, I had paused.
But it was she the bag, she that brought hell
For a dowry with her to her husband's house,
She the mock-mother, she that made the match
And married me to perdition, spring and source
O' the fire inside me that boiled up from heart
To brain and hailed the Fury gave it birth,
Violante Comparini, she it was,
With the old grin amid the wrinkles yet,
Opened: as if in turning from the Cross,
With trust to keep the sight and save my soul,
I had stumbled, first thing, on the serpent's head
Coiled with a leer at foot of it.
There was the end!
Then was I rapt away by the impulse, one
Immeasurable everlasting wave of a need
To abolish that detested life. 'Twas done:
You know the rest and how the folds of the thing,
Twisting for help, involved the other two
More or less serpent-like: how I was mad,
Blind, stamped on all, the earth-worms with the asp,
And ended so.
It is in such passages as this that we learn how
terrible an enemy Pompilia and Caponsacchi had to
meet; and again in his address to the Cardinal and
Abate sent to apprise him of the Pope's judgment
there are passages which enforce the same estimate
of the Count's intellectual abilities, and even show
up his power of mind in a still more favourable light;
for it is in that second address that he casts off all
invention of subtle pleas, and defends his crime on
the admission of Pompilia's innocence — speaks as
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OUR LIVING POETS.
one who has nothing more to gain by lying, and en-
deavours by a long array of common-sense arguments
to gain the intercession of the Cardinal and Abate.
He maintains throughout a perfect hardihood and
even indifference as to his execution, and on one
occasion refers to his forfeited head as 'flung with a
flourish;' and no doubt this is a true conception of
such a character-to whom some palpable evidence
of the desperateness of his case would be necessary
before he could realise the terrors of impending death.
With all his subtlety and acuteness he is not a man
who has been in the habit of realising abstract posi-
tions: a man who did this would not commit the
barbarities of Count Guido, from sheer pain of real-
ising the victim's pain ; nor could he plan deliberately
such a marital barter as the Count's, from sheer dis-
comfort of realising the mutual discomfort of a love-
less wedding between an elderly man and a girl of
thirteen, entirely unknown to each other: he is too
heartless, too violent in his hatreds, too quick in his
subtleties for complete and calm realisation, and is
therefore able to contemplate his own death with in-
difference, until he actually becomes aware of the
preparations being made outside for his march to the
scaffold.
A character like this is a fine subject for a violent
transition from outspoken, fearless hate, to terrible,
heartrending pleading for life; and in the whole range
ROBERT BROWNING.
137
of literature, probably, such a situation has never
been so powerfully handled as here. In the follow-
ing passage, which is the last of Count Guido's voice,
note specially the artistic splendour of the climax,
the final shriek to the murdered wife :
Nor is it in me to unhate my hates,-
I use up my last strength to strike once more
Old Pietro in the wine-house-gossip-face,
To trample under foot the whine and wile
Of that Violante,—and I grow one gorge
To loathingly reject Pompilia's pale
Poison my hasty hunger took for food.
A strong tree wants no wreaths about its trunk,
No cloying cups, no sickly sweet of scent,
But sustenance at root, a bucketful.
How else lived that Athenian who died so,
Drinking hot bull's blood, fit for men like me?
I lived and died a man, and take man's chance,
Honest and bold: right will be done to such.
Who are these you have let descend my stair?
Ha, their accursed psalm! Lights at the sill!
Is it "Open" they dare bid you? Treachery!
Sirs, have I spoken one word all this while
Out of the world of words I had to say ?
Not one word! All was folly—I laughed and mocked !
Sirs, my first true word, all truth and no lie,
Is-save me notwithstanding! Life is all!
I was just stark mad, let the madman live
Pressed by as many chains as you please pile!
Don't open! Hold me from them! I am yours,
I am the Grandduke's-no, I am the Pope's!
Abate, Cardinal,-Christ,-Maria,-God, ...
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?
The whole of Guido's second speech, and especi-
ally this last portion, gives us the revelation of a
blackened nature which is yet so intensely human in
its ways and manners, and even in some of its foibles
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OUR LIVING POETS.
and cruelties, that we cannot but follow the intel-
lectual clevernesses of the Count with an interest at
times widening into pity. We are made to feel in
the treatment of Guido that, though he is brutal,
unprincipled, treacherous, and malignant, there are
even for him antecedent and surrounding circum-
stances, not under his control, which have helped
him to develop into abnormal prominence the bad
elements of his nature, and suppress almost utterly
the good—that each of our human selves is conscious
of petty weaknesses and small sins such as might,
under circumstances less favourable than ours, have
led to results difficult to estimate and place definitely
below the crimes of Guido; and even for the villanous
Count the poet claims and gains our pity, with a
sigh to boot, that the crafty criminal's intellectuality
and energy of character should have missed employ-
ment for good instead of evil. It is by artistically
letting Guido speak last that the hardening of our
hearts against one so ferocious is avoided. Had the
harrowing details of the murder or any of the result-
ant miseries come after the picture of the poor cring-
ing Count as he realises for the first time the im-
pending execution, it would have been hard to spare
him the sigh we can now give for the wild despera-
tion of his cry for life.
But, valuable as are Guido's two speeches as a
complete study of character under varying circum-
ROBERT BROWNING.
139
stances, The Ring and the Book would hardly be the
grand work it is, from an ethic as well as an esthetic
point of view, had this depraved character been em-
bodied thus completely for the mere sake of what was
to be learned by the study of him, or for the mere
pleasure of producing or contemplating a creation
of unprecedented complexity and almost unrivalled
finish. The Count serves a nobler purpose in the
influence his energetic wickedness has in evoking
the supreme beauties of character and action latent
in the simply-lovely being Pompilia and the young
priest of only half-developed soul. Caponsacchi at
the time of his contact with Guido is a young man
of fine abilities and pure life enough, but not of a
systematically serious and contemplative mind: he
is a priest, indeed, who has accepted the priesthood
after having certain scruples, incident to a fresh
integrity of soul, satisfied by representation of those
who should have been his best advisers, but who
persuaded him that the service of the Church de-
manded no strait-laced conformity to the letter of
the priestly oaths. He is prone to take for truth
what comes with the breath of authority; and the
sceptical attitude is not consonant with his nature
until he is forcibly aroused to question not only
stated facts, but principles felt under ordinary cir-
cumstances to be binding. He is a youth, in fact,
doing without trouble of heart or mind the duties
140
OUR LIVING POETS.
represented by a worldly episcopacy as those of a
priest, and not the deeds of self-devotedness whereof
his nature is capable if roused. His whole career
indicates a man of marked impressibility -- not a
man given to calm reasoning. When his time comes
to take the ecclesiastical oaths, these impress him as
real and not as matter of empty breath, and he feels
that he is but ill prepared to perform them. He does
not of his own forethought turn and twist them to
find a sense wherein they may be laxly understood ;
but there comes to his assistance the counter-impres-
sion of an authoritative hierarchy, declaring in favour
of his aptitude for priest's duties—whereupon he is
content to cast in his lot with a church which has
his profound reverence. In matters of debate he
regards the inward voice that asserts the greatest
sway over his feelings; and being of a manly, un-
selfish nature, the result under due stress of cir-
cumstance is sure to be great and noteworthy. So
it comes about that, when Guido forges letters pur-
porting to be Pompilia's, begging the priest for love
and help, he is not moved to think meanly of her :
he has seen her once in a public place, and so strongly
is he possessed of a feeling of incongruity between
the transparent purity of her exterior and the base-
ness of these letters, that he unhesitatingly brushes
aside all suspicion of her and pierces at once to
the heart of the fraud. Guido's machinations serve
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141
.
however to rouse thoroughly Caponsacchi’s fire and
energy; and when at last he goes on a forged solicit-
ation to Pompilia's window, it is with mind prepared
and muscles braced to pull out and belabour the
forger if need be. Then it is that he actually meets
Pompilia; and learning that the Count has also been
carrying on a counter-forgery of letters to his wife,
the whole man is roused to grant the assistance she
beseeches him to give her in escaping from the usage
she is undergoing, even though he have to cast to
the winds all thought of how the gossips of Arezzo
may interpret the flight of wife and priest. Ho
accepts at once the truth of all she tells him, is con-
vinced of the necessity to save her, makes the needful
preparations, and carries out this breach of priestly
discipline. The natural proneness to accept authority
save under strong emotional conviction comes back
when he is relegated for this escapade: he submits
calmly, and when summoned to give evidence on
the trial he obeys; but as he warms to the discus-
sion of the murder his whole soul boils over in
eloquent vindication of Pompilia and execration of
Guido. Unawed by the august presence of judges,
he stands as a man addressing men; and such a
man as he whose heart is here laid bare it is hardly
ever our lot to encounter whether in art or in life.
The poet's manner in this speech is subtly modified
to the occasion : instead of the flow of well-considered
D-
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OUR LIVING POETS.
argumentative eloquence which we get from Guido,
there is here a short, direct, vivid manner of nar-
ration, while the speaker is calmly giving evidence;
but, as soon as he comes to points at which he is
deeply moved at heart, up wells the fervid oratory of
nature, as for instance in the passage wherein he
speaks of the murderer's appropriate punishment,
and conceives him as meeting Judas Iscariot after
being pushed by the general horror and common
hate' from all ' honest forms of life,' till left ' not to
die so much as slide out of life:'
And thus I see him slowly and surely edged
Off all the table-land whence life upsprings
Aspiring to be immortality,
As the snake, hatched on hill-top by mischance,
Despite his wriggling, slips, slides, slidders down
Hill-side, lies low and prostrate on the smooth
Level of the outer place, lapsed in the vale :
So I lose Guido in the loneliness,
Silence and dusk, till at the doleful end,
At the horizontal line, creation's rerge,
From what just is to absolute nothingness-
Lo, what is this he mcets, strains onward still ?
What other man deep further in the fato,
Who, turning at the prize of a footfall
To flatter him and promise fellowship,
Discovers in the act a frightful face
Judas, made monstrous by much solitude !
The tiro are at one now! Let them love their love
That bites and claws like hate, or hate their hate
That mops and mows and makes as it were love!
There, let them each tear each in devil's fun,
Or fondle this the other while malice aches,
Both teach, both learn detestability!
Kiss him the kiss, Iscariot! Pay that back,
That smatch o' the slaver blistering on your lip--
By the better trick, the insult he spared Christ-
ROBERT BROWNING.
143
Lure him the lure o' the letters, Aretine!
Lick him o'er slimy-smooth with jelly-filth
O'the verse-and-prose pollution in love's guise !
The cockatrice is with the basilisk!
There let them grapple, denizens o' the dark,
Foes or friends, but indissolubly bound,
In their one spot out of the ken of God
Or care of man, for ever and ever more !'
This eloquent burst serves to call up the scene of
the priest's examination so vividly painted in the first
book; and we have the suggestion of the judges, cul-
pably neglectful at a former stage of the proceedings,
cowering before the terrible tide of truth and emotion
sweeping straight from the heart of a noble and out-
raged man who knows no guile. But perhaps the
highest utterance of this man is the pathetic close of
his address, wherein much subtle and exquisite sen-
timent follows the sad burden,
"You see, we are
So very piliable, she and I,
Who had conceivably been otherwise.'
There is very little poetry of the present day more
beautiful in aspiration or expression than these few
final lines,
"To have to do with nothing but the true,
The good, the eternal—and these, not alone
In the main current of the general life,
But small experiences of every day,
Concerns of the particular hearth and home:
To learn not only by a comet's rush
But a rose's birth, -not by the grandeur, God-
But the comfort, Christ. All this, how far away!
Mere delectation, meet for a minute's dream!
Just as a drudging student trims his lamp,
Opens his Plutarch, puts him in the place
1 44
POETS.
TT
OUR LIVING Of Roman, Grecian ; draws the patched gown close,
Dreams, "Thus should I fight, save or rule the world!”—
Then smilingly, contentedly, awakes
To the old solitary nothingness.
So I, from such communion, pass content.'
And yet what a deep pathos of content is revealed in
the one only line that follows, -
"O great, just, good God! Miserable me!'
Pompilia's character is one which makes analysis
a superfuity by reason of its mere simple purity.
Every utterance of hers is at once child-like and wo-
manly, and comes fresh from a soul to which evil is
unknown save as an infliction from without, while
she has yet the full tale of womanly emotions. Stand-
ing between Guido and Caponsacchi, she is a perfect
example at once of feminine endurance and of the
power & fine woman - nature has over a fine man-
nature. Whoever reads her speech will feel more
or less the inexpressible something which not only
conquers the educated and scrupulous Canon and
draws to her the simple-minded Augustinian Friar
who acts as her confessor, but also sways towards her
all who enter the hospital where her four days' dying
is accomplished. The most complete description of
Pompilia is that given in the first book in three
words—young, good, beautiful. The last two epi-
thets are hard to define; but we can feel almost in-
fallibly, on close contact, whether they apply to a
person or a work of art; and thus, with Pompilia,
ROBERT BROWNING.
145
every reader must know, before he has lurned many
pages of her death-bed speech, that he is reading
good and beautiful poetry, which places him face to
face with a good and beautiful soul. She is charm-
ingly simple when she tells of the first visit of Guido;
and there is an irresistible fragrance and freshness of
girlhood, able to survive all the terrible troubles of
the young wife, in the little tale she tells of her very
young days—how she and a neighbour's child played
at finding each other out in a tapestry representing
a hunt of Diana. Note the loveliness of her remem-
bered injunction to her playmate :-
Tisbe, that is you,
With half-moon on your hair-knot, spear in hand,
Flying, but no wings, only the great scarf
Blown to a bluish rainbow at your back :
Call off your hound and leave the stag alone!'
But it is when she speaks of her newly-born baby
that the most touching loveliness of her nature is
shown : her thankfulness that he was born and safely
hidden before the murder, her perfect little touches
of remembrance of what gossips have said to comfort
her for his loss, her tender surmises as to what he
may grow to think of his dead young mother, and her
apt comparison of herself to the poor virgin at our
street-corner in a lonely niche—the babe, that sat
upon her knees, broke off,'—all these matters bring
her out in exquisite relief against the hideous back-
ground of her circumstances.
146
OUR LIVING POETS.
In the mouth of the Pope, who takes so important
a position in the book, Browning places judgments
and sentiments which seem to correspond with those
whereof he has delivered himself at starting; and
beautifully does the noble old man here painted ex-
press himself on Pompilia, whom he calls
"My rose I gather for the breast of God.
In the breast of the Augustinian Friar, too, her
sweetness germinates; and a piece of notable elo-
quence exists in what the poet has saved, in his
epilogue, of the Friar's funeral sermon : especially
fine are the following lines,-
'Because Pompilia's purity prevails,
Conclude you, all truth triumphs in the end?
So might those old inhabitants of the ark,
Witnessing haply their dove's safe return,
Pronounce there was no danger all the while
O'the deluge, to the creature's counterparts,
Aught that beat wing i' the world, was white or soft, -
And that the lark, the thrush, the culver too,
Might equally have traversed air, found earth,
And brought back olive-branch in ạnharmed bill.
Methinks I hear the Patriarch's warning voice-
“ Though this one breast, by miracle, return,
No wave rolls by, in all the waste, but bears
Within it some dead dove-like thing as dear,
Beauty made blank and harmlessness destroyed !" !
Pompilia will take rank among the highest of the
great women of art-beside Imogen and Juliet, our
sweetest kin on art's side.' Never was a character
of greater solidity and clearness built of materials so
simple. Complex enough are the surrounding cha-
ROBERT BROWNING.
147
racters and scenery; but nothing in healthy psycho-
logy can be less complex than this absolute piece of
feminine integrity, displaying in every word of her
mouth and at every turn of her sad history some
trait of a being
'Perfect, white and clean
Outside as inside, soul and soul's demesnę.'
Like Caponsacchi, Pompilia is so little dependent on
anything but nobility of character and treatment for
the interest she excites, the exquisite pleasure her
speech yields, and the genuine help to be got from it
in breasting the troubles of every day, that one may
feel confident in the efficiency of time to make this
work a popular poem—so far at least as these two
books of it are concerned. It will only be necessary
for the book to become widely known and circulated
at a comparatively cheap rate for it to address itself,
not to the limited circle who have hitherto been close
readers of Browning, not even to the less limited
circle who read for fashion's sake a great deal of mo-
dern poetry to the exclusion of Browning, but to the
limitless circle for whom shilling Shakespeares are
printed — the wide class whose education fits them
for the appreciation of whatever addresses itself to
profound human feelings, though perhaps leaving
them unable to appreciate the intellectual subtleties
so frequently and finely embodied by the same poet.
Whether The Ring and the Book has been a
148
OUR LIVING POETS.
success' in the ordinary sense, this is no place to dis-
cuss; in the highest sense it certainly is. The poet
himself seems not unhopeful in the words,
· British Public, who may like me yet,
(Marry and amen!),'—
and, though he has certainly not done his genius the
violence of adopting aught from the popular style of
the day, he has evidently laboured much to make his
meaning perfectly clear in this last work. If a full
popularity come in the poet's lifetime, well! “If not,
well also, but not so well.' Be it borne in mind that
what the poet writes,
He writes : mankind accepts it if it suits,
And that's success: if not, the poem's passed
From hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand,
Until the unborn snatch it, crying out
In pity on their fathers' being so dull,
and that's success too.'
(D
Dramatic poetry has been pretty generally held
to be the highest form of the art, and probably with
good reason; but it may be questioned whether the
conventional modes of drama be a necessary con-
dition to the award of the high title of " dramatic
poet.' Browning seems to me to be essentially, al-
most exclusively, a dramatic poet as regards manner
of work—not so much on the strength of his nine
plays as by virtue of his works in monologue, which
display, altogether, more originality of thought and
treatment. To maintain a complete and absolute
Un
ROBERT BROWNING.
149
-
i
impersonality in matter, and yet to develop and pre-
serve a strong and unmistakable individuality in
manner—to depict a wide variety of character with-
out palpable bias, and yet to leave the moral bearings
of the product not only uninvolved but strongly self-
evident- these are the two correlative aims with
which every great dramatic poet who cherishes the
idea of benefiting his race must labour, whether he
has formulated those aims thus in his mind or merely
holds them there dispersed as intellectual light and
emotional warmth-whether he has inscribed canons
for his guidance on the walls of his study or merely
works on, as is probably most often the case, with
head and heart right by virtue of innate superiority,
and able to dispense with canons and formulas. With
Browning these correlative aims seem never for a
moment to have failed of their strong due influence;
and in the long series of his labours we discern a
complete attainment of the twofold object, although,
quitting the conventional forms of drama, he has
chosen to follow a course which may have been in
the mind of the great poetess when she penned her
splendid fervent lines on dramatic art—looking for-
ward to the time when dramatists should take for a
worthier stage the soul itself.'
While designating Browning as an essentially
and exclusively dramatic poet, it is needful to note
his entire separation from anything connected with
150
OUR LIVING POETS.
the modern stage. It is difficult to avoid regarding
the stage drama as virtually defunct, except for sensa-
tional purposes, and as used by music; and, in this
view, there is nothing remarkable in the fact that
the nobly imagined drama Strafford was a failure
when produced on the stage under Macready's aus-
pices in 1837. Browning's dramas, though intensely
dramatic in character, are so subtle in some of the
actions and indications as to require at times a not
inconsiderable mental effort to catch the result in-
tended to be conveyed. Those who go to the theatre
go to be amused and excited without trouble--the
treat is to be one of the senses; and Browning's
plays, though they abound in attractions of feeling
and excited action, have those qualities in a highly
refined form, and often so veiled by subtlety of
thought, that they would not be likely to get appre-
ciated unless the theatre-audience were prepared to
put up with a treat of much intellectuality and no
sensationalism-almost an impossibility in the pre-
sent degraded state of stages and theatre-audiences.
These plays are not, for all their subtlety, by any
means lacking in the right qualities of the actable
drama, though in this respect Browning has a living
superior in Mr. R. H. Horne. The personality of
Byron's dramas was, and would now be, enough to
ensure their failure, notwithstanding the strength,
majesty, and beauty, which parts of them show when
(
ROBERT BROWNING.
151
analysed as poems; but in Browning's there is no
such personality to obstruct our view of the beauties
-only a subtlety of thought which, however much
it may contribute towards the impossibility of put-
ting them on a modern stage, can only be regarded
by the cultivated reader as an exceedingly precious
quality. The low tone of the theatre nowadays is no
fault of contemporary dramatists, and does not take
an iota from the value of fine actable plays, which
are generally in a form not easily surpassed for artistic
qualities.
On that 'worthier stage the soul itself 'which
Browning has used almost exclusively for many years
in the place of a stage where boards and footlights
are at all events implied, the greatest feat that has
as yet been performed is The Ring and the Book,
in which dramatic art has received a distinctly epic
magnificence of structure. The common idea that
epic poetry is no longer possible is obviously absurd,
even without practical evidence to the contrary, and
has arisen from the false notion that “heroic' is a
term applicable only to wars and large material actions.
Now that Walt Whitman on the other side of the
Atlantic has written what has been fitly termed the
' Epic of Democracy,' and Browning on this side has
furnished what may be as fitly called the 'Epic of
Psychology,' the idea of the decease of the epic is
more than ever a dead idea. The day has long gone
152
OUR LIVING POETS.
by when heroism meant pugilism, and the might of
man was measured by toughness of muscle. Breadth
of mind and width of heart come first now, and the
largest action is not that which covers the greatest
area and deploys the largest aggregate of physical
powers, but that which involves most disinterested-
ness, philanthropy, purity of heart, power of thought
-in short the maximum of intellectual and moral
force. For such a display, one set of modern men
and women may serve for types as well as another;
and the Roman murder case of a hundred and eighty
years ago, which has so strongly taken hold of Brown-
ing, was the germ of what is perhaps more essentially
modern than any great poetic production these latter
centuries have yielded in England.
It is impossible in a short space to do anything
like critical justice to The Ring and the Book. The
value of a work of this magnitude from a poet with
the wide artistic powers, the 'intellectual equipment,'
and the profound excellence of heart which we find
in Browning, is not easy to estimate when we take
into consideration the range of a powerful poet's
influence, not only on his contemporaries, but also
on those who are to people the long void vista of the
onward centuries.
WILLIAM W. STORY.
And concluding, which is clear,
The growing drama has outgrown such toys
Of simulated stature, face, and speech,
It also peradventure may outgrow
The simulation of the painted scene,
Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume,
And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,
Its shifting fancies and celestial lights,
With all its grand orchestral silences
To keep the pauses of its rhythmic sounds.'
E. B. BROWNING.
WILLIAM W. STORY.
12
THOSE who have known that the hand which chiselled
the Cleopatra' of the 1862 Exhibition, and wrote
Roba di Roma, has also been for some years past
contributing poems to sundry magazines, must have
read those poems with considerable interest as they
appeared from time to time; and whoever read Mr.
Story's Primitive Christian in Rome, published in
the Fortnightly Review for December 1866, must
have been struck at once with the ability of that poem
as a product of the psychological method employed
by Browning. So able was that piece that it was
evident that the author was no novice, though it was
just as evident that he was not a poet of the first
order. The poem lacked music, but even in that it
was not glaringly deficient, and at the same time it
was so well thought out, the historic situation as
well as the attitude of the speaker's mind were so
well rounded off to an issue, that it was impossible
not to be interested to know what hoard of such wares
the author was saying up. In the autumn of 1868
an assortment of these wares was put forth under
the title of Graffiti d'Italia ; and excessively inter-
156
OUR LIVING POETS.
esting is the book to those who care for anything
more than mere jingle or 'sentiment in poetry. Mr.
Story is, as many of my readers are doubtless aware,
an American ; but as he has Europeanised himself
and come forward among English literati, we may
fairly look on him as our own property. A poet of
the scholar grade, his career suggests some striking
antitheses when looked at beside that of the scholar-
poet Miss Smedley, already referred to. Miss Smed-
ley has been long before the public in an unpoetic
capacity; but no work of hers except her most ma-
ture volume of poetry has excited general interest;
whereas Mr. Story, in his Roba di Roma, furnished
a work of prose which may be regarded as standard,
while his productions in sculpture are almost too
well known and too highly meritorious to leave one
an excuse for naming them here. But in poetry both
authors are disciples disciples not of one master, but
of two masters as diametrically opposed almost as
Mr. Martin Tupper and the late M. Baudelaire. One
of these masters, as we have seen, is the Laureate,
and the other Browning, who, though not as popular
as Tennyson, has done quite as much towards revivi-
fying English poetry. Browning has been studied
closely by nearly all the poets of the younger genera-
tion, and offshoots of his genius may be found by a
discerning eye in a long range of volumes; but only
one other has as thoroughly assimilated his method
WILLIAM W. STORYA
157
.
as Mr. Story has, or produced poems of such sterling
merit as Mr. Story's, modelled on the plan followed
in the bulk of Browning's most notable works. It is
not only that Browning's mode of treating a situation
has been skilfully and intelligently adopted by the
sculptor, with attention to the distribution of a poem's
parts even ; but the situations selected by Mr. Story
are often of the order which Browning so much
affects. While Miss Smedley seeks out material for
her genial and delicate verse in situations and sub-
jects of a decidedly popular style, Mr. Story follows
his great prototype into quaint and unexplored re-
gions of the human heart and mind, and shows a
special love for those subjects which address the
sympathies of the artist-class and the lovers of subtle
intellectuality generally, and even betrays at times
an aptitude and relish for grotesque in poetry, analo-
gous in kind, though different in degree of execution,
to that found in Browning's works. Thus, while
Miss Smedley, without losing sight of the fact that
man is an intellectual being, addresses the emotional
nature in particular, Mr. Story, even in dealing with
emotional subjects, makes an appeal which, by virtue
of method or matter, usually addresses in particular
the intellectual side of the mind.
A further and more technical antithesis between
these two poets lies in the fact that, while one has
made a praiseworthy and successful attempt to pro-
t
158
OUR LIVING POETS.
duce a drama on the right model for stage purposes,
the other, ignoring the stage, has largely adopted
that form of dramatic writing perfected in our own
time, wherein the only stage is the mind, and wherein
action and discussion, time and place, are all spoken
or implied by one mouth for each work, namely the
dramatic monologue. A Primitive Christian in
Rome, perhaps the best known of Mr. Story's mono-
logues, bears traces here and there of a less practised
hand than is shown in some of the other pieces. But
the outlines of the form, as well as the matter em-
bodied, are excellent: it is in the texture of the verse
that one feels at times a great deficiency. The 'pri-
mitive Christian,' addressing a fellow-Christian, ad-
duces and discusses-the four most obvious kinds of
objection brought by the pagan majority against the
new faith. The discussion is well sustained and
not immoderately lengthy, though there is not that
weight in every line which a supreme poem of the
same order would carry. Of four classes of objectors
the first three are not hard to dispose of; and Mr.
Story obtains an artistic climax by saving the hardest
for the last, and forcing the Christian to fall back
for support on the quickening eloquence of Paul the
Apostle. Referring to the arguments of a stolid and
earnest believer in the faith which had been sufficient
for such men as Socrates and Plato,— Shall I,' says
the Christian,
WILLIAM W. STORY159
1
.
dare question what such minds affirm?
"Obey! Obey !" a voice within me cries
('Tis the old echo of my early faith),
And then, “Arouse !" cries out a stronger voice,
“Arouse! shake off this torpor! Sink not down
In the old creed-casy because 'tis old;
In the dead faith—so fixed, because 'tis dead."
Let us go in and speak with Paul again.
He is so strong, he braces up our faith,
And stiffens all the sinews of the mind.'
11
It is easy to understand this attitude of mind under
the circumstances depicted in the piece—the old
faith still vital about the convert, the old temples
still devoted to the old use, the old incense still
smoking up to the fair gods derived from classic
Greece; and Mr. Story has taken care to give us,
with as artistic a manipulation of word and thought as
is shown in the conclusion (just quoted), a passage be-
traying the charm which the sweet tales of the Olym-
pian gods still hold over the soul of an earnest but
not too austere follower of the Nazarene,-one who,
though his heart has been claimed for the new creed,
and his intellect has renounced the errors of the old,
still yearns for the sweetness it was to think
• Of Aphrodite rising from the sea,
The incarnate dream of beauty; of the staid,
Calm dignity of wisdom bodied forth
In grand Minerva ; of the gracious joy,
The charm of nature, Bacchus represents ;
Of Flora scattering flowers and breathing spring;
Of all those lovely shapes that lurking gleam
Through nature's sunny openings.' ...
And he even confesses that
160
OUR LIVING POETS.
"At times, the one Eternal Father seems
So far away, and this fair world that teemed
With airy shapes, so void and cold and bare.'
27
The poem of this author's which forms the most
striking pendant to this, and which indeed can
scarcely be thought of apart from this, is not in the
volume at all; it is entitled A Roman Lawyer at
Jerusalem-First Century, and appeared in Black-
wood's Magazine * at about the time when Graffiti
d'Italia was issued. Perhaps one of the best known
of Browning's poems is the Epistle of Karshish, the
Arabian physician, telling his strange experiences'
of a case of mania to a brother physician–the case
being none other than that of Lazarus, whom Kar-
shish has encountered at Bethany, and whose tale
has assumed a strange interest in his mind. That
poem has unquestionably suggested to Mr. Story the
idea carried out in A Roman Lawyer, of analysing
from a technical point of view the story of Judas's
betrayal of Christ. The manner of the lawyer's
analysis is of course distinct from the manner of the
physician's scrutiny; but the situations are parallel,
and the chances are that, had the letter of Karshish
not been written, the epistle of Marcus the lawyer
would also never have come into being. The Arab
physician tells the hallucination of Lazarus as a
pathological prodigy (for, of course, he regards as
a hallucination the belief of Lazarus that Christ
* October 1868.
LU
WILLIAM W. STORY.
161
raised him from the dead); but at the same time he
betrays that the doctrine of redemption, which he
learns from the Jew, has taken hold on his heart
and stirred the bases of his belief. The Roman law-
yei', while discussing with a lawyer's acuteness the
istory of Judas as told by Lysias the centurion, con-
fesses to his friend, in a passing allusion .to Paul, a
tendency bred of the history he has been learning,
to excuse his faith,
And half admit the Christus he thinks God.
Is, at the least, a most mysterious man.'
It would be unfair not to note the tameness of this,
compared with the enthusiastic postscript of Karshish,
• The very God! think, Abib; Dost thou think?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too-
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, “O heart I made, a heart beats here !
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself,
Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!".
The madman saith He said so: it is strange.?.
The well-aired theory of the betrayal adopted by
Mr: Story is an interesting sample of that specially
modern form of humanitarianism, the desire to clear
the reputation of an historical personage who has
been held in abhorrence from time immemorial.
The position taken up in regard to Iscariot is anal-
ogous to that adopted by Mr. Lewes in writing of
Nero and Robespierre; and such a position is per-
M
162
OUR LIVING POETS.
haps more grateful in a work of art than in an his-
torical essay. The essay on Robespierre gives one
the idea of a theory enthusiastically embraced at
starting, but becoming gradually less and less dear
to the theorist as research went on; but in treating,
a theory poetically there is no likelihood, because
there is no need, of verifying as one writes. The
incidents of a poem, and especially of a poem dra-
matic in principle, are set down not as facts, but as
what are to be regarded as facts from the point of
view adopted in the poem; so that, in treating a
theory according to which Judas Iscariot was a most
worthy individual, Mr. Story has not laid himself
open to be attacked as one who would 'whitewash'
the proverbial traitor, but has simply shown, in the
potent manner of psychological art, that the conduct.
of the personage in question admits of a charitable
explanation. The Roman lawyer betrays an inclina-
tion to believe the account given him by Lysias, who
figures in the poem as an old friend of Judas, and
according to whose view the Christ was betrayed by
one who blundered in attempting to do a great thing.
Lysias believes, in fact, that Judas, warmly devoted
to his master, and fervently convinced of his god-
head, conceived the idea that if he gave Christ into
the hands of his enemies, a manifestation of the
master's godhead must perforce take place, to the in-
evitable conviction of all witnesses; but that, seeing
1
WILLIAM W. STORY.
163
no such manifestation, and finding Christ a prisoner
and undone, he learned how fearful a mistake he had
made, and 'turned, and went and hanged himself.'
This position is ably sustained in matter of argu-
ment, and there is a good deal of fine writing in the
poem.
But Mr. Story has what we may fairly call a
popular side to his mind even as a poet. The poem
we have quoted would be considered at least severe
in subject and style ; and one who had met with
nothing by the same author beyond this work might
conclude that Graffiti (l' Italia vas suited alone to
those who care for what is known as dry poetry.
This is not at all the case : throughout the volume
are scattered poems of a far more genial stamp, and of
many kinds. That entitled Cleopatra scarcely comes
near to the work in marble on the same subject; but
it is full of fire and passion, and works up to an
almost furious conclusion that must take even the
most apathetic reader by storm. The Egyptian,
lying and longing for Antony, dreams of a time,
'æons of thought away,' when she and her lover, in
accordance with the doctrine of the transmigration of
souls, were two tigers; and after a vivid picture of
feline love-making and other pursuits, she cries out:
That was a life to live for!
Not this weak human life,
TVith its frivolous bloodless passions,
Its poor and petty strife!
164
OUR LIVING POETS.
Come to my arms, my hero,
The shadows of twilight grow,
And the tiger's ancient fierceness
In my veins begins to flot.
Come not cringing to sue me!
Take me with triumphi and power,
As a warrior storms a fortress!
I will not shrink or cover.
Come, as you came in the desert,
Ere we were women and men,
When the tiger passions were in us,
And love as you loved me then!'
Taken as from a modern lady's lips, this sort of
writing might not commend itself highly to a refined
sense; but regarded as a study in antique psychology
it is admirable.
The largest piece in the book — the piece too
which is placed first—is entitled Ginevra da Siena.
It is a very elaborate monologue, and the author has
not displayed in it that reticence of descriptiveness
and of violent action that a contemplative mind finds
abundantly to praise in Browning's large monologues
- which are devoted with far. greater unity of pur-
pose to the exposition of mental phenomena, both
intellectual and emotional. · Some of his earlier pro-
ductions of this class—some few pieces which he
calls dramatic romances and dramatic lyrics—betray
far more of this love of physical activity, as, for in-
stance, The Flight of the Duchess and Waring, How
they Brought the Good News, and the Cavalier Tunes.
And we might infer from analogy that this Ginevra
da Siena is a younger piece of Mr. Story's than
1
Uuu
UT
WILLIAM W. STORY.
165
many in the book. The Countess Ginevra, who is
shut up in a lonely villa by a jealous husband, re-
counts her whole sad story to a female friend. She
tells how she was married, how her husband was cold
and distant from first to last, how the birth of their
child failed to warm his heart, how he brought á
kinsman to the house for her to entertain, and daily
left them together, and how they two became mutually
enamoured. Then follows the account of her lover's
proposal to fly together, her difficult but decided
rejection, suspicion on the part of her husband, the
murder of her lover by her husband in single combat,
and: finally the incarceration of herself-guilty of a
foreign love, though innocent of the great transgrès-
sion.?: All this is given with considerable detail, and
interspersed', with much :description:of accessories;
and although the whole is; done well, i, and with no
dearth of beautiful thoughts, it: is difficult, not to feel
that the evident intention: to concentrate the reader's
mind on the one set of phenomena--the painful de-
velopment and decadence of Ginevra's emotional life
-is in a measure foiled by a too copious introduction
of detail and circumstance. Still the poem is a good
poem ; what is more to the point, it is very interest-
ing; and the method of verse, though not productive
of the exquisite effects in rhythmic and verbal mosaic
affected by extreme moderns, is far from antiquated.
The quality of verse is much the same in the
1:66
OUR LIVING POETS.
1
.
* Primitive Christian' and other poems written in
blank iambics; but the quality of thought is very
much higher and deeper in that as in many others.
Not imitative of Browning in matters of detail, Mr.
Story has yet, in the best of his poems, clearly as-
similated the method of this most original and power-
ful of contemporary poets, and, I should say, he has
consciously and studiously assimilated it--a thing
which is the more to his credit, looking at the diffi-
culty of working in that method as compared with
many others. Perhaps the best of the pieces in this
method is In the Antechamber of Monsignore del
Fiocco-which is altogether excellent. It is short,
brilliant, pithy, and thoroughly well compacted —
far more so than the last mentioned, which, though
necessarily discursive, might perhaps be thought open
to the charge of superfluous diffuseness. “In the
Antechamber,' a more than half-unwilling servant of
“Monsignore del Fiocco' summarises his mingled
feelings of disgust and scorn at the psychological
spectacle afforded by his master, who has been so
successful in the church that he is about to become
a cardinal; and the contrast between the half-frank
discutant and the unctuous but immoral dignitary
discussed is so boldly and artistically rendered, that
the piece almost recalls the brilliant Soliloquy of the
Spanish Cloister, or the more than brilliant Bishop
Order's his Tomb. After running rapidly through
WILLIAM W. STORY.
167
various charges against the corrupt ecclesiast-charges
more thrown in by artistic innuendo than by direct
expression - this healthy-minded servant, healthy-
minded because submitting to a corrupt but inevitable
rule under strong mental protest, ends thus:
* And this reminds memdid you ever know
Nina, that tall, majestic, fierce-eyed girl,
With blue-black hair, which, when she loosed it, shook
Its crimpled darkness almost to the floor?
She that was friend to Monsignor while yet
He was a humble Abbé-born indeed
In the same town and came to live in Rome?
Not know her? She, I mean, who disappeared
Some ten years back, and God knows how or why?
Well, Nina, -are you sure there's no one near ?-
Nina
Per Dio! how his stinging bell
Startled my blood, as if the Monsignor
Cried out, “ You, Giacomo; what, there again
At your old trick of talking? Hold your tonguc !"
And so I will, per Bacco, so I will ;
Who tells no secrets breaks no confidence.
Nature, as Monsignor has often said,
Gave us two eyes, two ears, and but one tongue,
As if to say, “Tell half you see and hear;"
And I'm an ass to let my tongue ruu on,
After such lessons. There he rings again !
Vengomper Dio-Vengo subito.'
There is great variety of subject in the book, and
no monotony of metrical execution ; but the bulk of
the poems are in the one method; and though many
of them are of such superior quality that they must
draw attention wherever met, the chief point to be
insisted on is the author's great success in the use
of this very difficult and essentially modern method.
VI.
AUGUSTA WEBSTER.
You saw me gather men and women,
Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,
Enter each and all, and use their service,
Speak from every mouth,—the speech, a poem.'
R. BROWNING.
AUGUSTA WEBSTER.
MRS. WEBSTER's two best-known volumes make up a
very respectable show of work done consistently and
consciously in the method of Browning; and that
method is followed with completer consistency and
seeming consciousness in the last collection of Por-
traits than in the former collection of Dramatic
Studies. This is a disciple-poet of whose productions
it cannot be said that they hold much evidence of the
absolute necessity for poetic utterance, unfailingly
betrayed by the master-pocts of this time and other
times; and yet the age need not care to spare such
work as Mrs. Webster has done; for it is not only
valuable as a compact proof how firmly the analytic
method is taking root, but is also supported by a
good knowledge of modern life and thought, a good
classical erudition, much sterling thought if no strik-
ingly new ideas, and the faculty of neat work at will.
Those who want the rapt utterance of a Mrs.
Browning, or the chiselled perfection and lovely sen-
timent and tender music of a Miss Rossetti, must not
seek it here. Of the occasional lyrics of Mrs. Web-
172
OUR LIVING POETS.
ster—whether of those published under the pseu-
donym Cecil Home,' or of those that go to make up
a large proportion of the other poems' printed with
A Woman Sold—there is scarcely one that is even
striking, and certainly not one that forces itself on
the heart and mind as a lyric must do if it be one
indeed; but throughout the volumes there is that
degree of competency to handle the language, and
mould it into respectable verse, that is indispensable
to the verse-producer, whether he is to be greatly
original or a creditable disciple. The salient quality
of Mrs. Webster's work, however, is a keen power of
analysis and self-elimination, such as fits her pecu-
liarly for graduation in that school wherein her name
has been here included; and her works in the fashion
of that school are really noteworthy. .!
Her few hundred pages of neat 'mediocre lyric
work, perhaps making up a preponderant bulk if her
labours be divided into classifiable and unclassifiable,
did not earn for her any wide repute, and never would
have earned for her a name to be preserved more
than a few seasons, even if poems of the complete
excellence of the ballad called The River* existed in
considerable numbers (as they do not) among worse
works. The thoughts in this unclassifiable division
of work are generally good as far as they go; but
they are never great or very deep: the workmanship
* In A Woman Sold, &c.
7
AUGUSTA WEBSTER.
173
is always passably good, but it is never original. In
point of execution, these minor poems derive from
Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, and in a lesser degree
from Browning and Miss Rossetti; and a derivative
style wherein so many prototypes are traceable will
never give any piquancy of tone to poetry of any
order. It is only when the larger lines of a preëxist-
ing method are seized wholly and intelligently by a
scholar-poet that a derived method can be made to
embody memorable results; and this is why a posi-
tion such as Mrs. Webster would never have attained
by her miscellaneous verses will in all likelihood be
long assigned to her on account of her many good
monologues, fashioned after the shaping of Browning.
In most of these there is far less minute mannerism
than in the others : what there is is traceable chiefly
to Mrs. Browning, and just a little to the Laureate ;
—while there are a few small disagreeable matters of
style not to be traced to these poets—such as the
l'epeated use of the adverb almost' as an adjective-
can almost child'-
and the same misuse of other adverbs, as in
to think
On the once themes is to be my once self'
and
* Joy at this house's now despair.'
Such things as these are too dreadful to be criticised.
In the two foregoing sections of this essay, mono-
174
V
OUR LIVING POETS.
S
logue poetry has been spoken of so fully that no fur-
ther space must be devoted to abstract discussion of
it; and we may at once look at Mrs. Webster's con-
tributions to it.
In the earlier volume of Dramatic Studies, pub-
lished in 1866, the two most striking poems are,
curiously enough, those in which there is a certain
defect of realism less suitable to this solid modern
form of verse than to some elder, more ethereal
forms. The two poems are The Snow Waste and
With the Dead. The unreality of the former consists
mainly in its being in part allegorical, while that of
the latter rests on what the modern mind rejects as
unscientific and absurd—the purgatorial prolongation
of a human life after the fashion of the Wandering
Jew. In fact, in The Snow Waste, the mysterious
exigencies of the subject have forced the author into
using an element quite foreign to monologue or dra-
matic poetry, namely snatches of narrative on the
writer's own part; and had it not been designated a
· Dramatic Study,' one would scarcely have regarded it
as dramatic at all; but inasmuch as the vital thread
of the poem is a realistic tale of love and hate, told
by the man who has given himself up to those pas-
sions, we may accept the work for what it has been
called, and admire the vivid realisation of the phases
of passion treated in it. It is not, however, a plea-
surable poem: the frightful opening picture of one
SS
AUGUSTA WEBSTER.
173
sitting ʼmid a waste of snow,' with nothing living but
himself, companioned by two forms that seemed of
flesh, but blue with the first clutchings of their
deaths,' has only power to recommend it; and the
tale he tells, how he bore his wife's brother a fierce hate
of jealousy, is a powerful rendering of that arrogant
egotism of a mean soul, who cannot bear the idea
that any one but himself is dear to her he thinks he
loves. How the tenant of the 'waste of snow loses
his wife by the plague, and how he tricks his brother-
in-law into going in to embrace the corpse, and then
locks him in with it to catch the plague, and how the
murderer comes back to gloat over the last writhings
of his victim, are things too revolting to leave one any
pleasure in looking at the corresponding phases of
passion and thought, handled with no small strength
in this poem. And it must be confessed that other
pieces of Mrs. Webster's bear marks of disfigurement
by what I cannot but call a coarse power—a lack of
fineness in the conception and treatment. :
The subject of With the Dead is really handled
greatly, and there is no coarseness about it. The
piece is carried out with a thoroughly dramatic
realism ; and the situation can be construed as a
possible one, though the speaker has to tell of certain
supernatural things. The foundation of the poem is
the following little bit of dialogue in the Catacombs,
from Hawthorne's Transformation :
176
OUR LIVING POETS.
"" Has any one ever been lost here ?” askod Kenyon of the
guide.
66. Surely, signor : one, no longer ago than my father's time,"
said the guide; and he added with the air of a man who believed
what he was telling, “but the first that went astray here was a
pagan of old Rome, who hid himself in order to spy out and betray
the blessed saints, who then dwelt and worshipped in these dismal
places. You have heard the story, signor? A miracle was vrought
upon the accursed one; and, ever since (for fifteen centuries at least),
he has been groping in the darkness, seeking his way out of the
catacomb.".
Again in this poem the connecting thread is a jealous
hatred; but the treatment of the passion is finely
contrasted with its treatment in The Snow Waste.
The pagan, in love with a Christian maiden, and
having lost her through her preference for Glaucon,
a fellow-Christian, feigns half-conversion, and betrays
the Christians in the hope of saving her and getting
Glaucon out of the way. The time at which he tells
his tale here is most likely meant to be one of certain
hours of rest vouchsafed to him yearly—that is to
say, any time during the fifteen centuries named by
the guide ; but the realism of the manner is saved
from being spoiled if we recall the possibility that
what the speaker is saying may merely be his own
mad conception of what has taken place immediately
after his betrayal of the Christians; and to have seen
his Lucilla made what Browning calls “panther's
meat might well have sent the wretched fellow mad.
How the stubborn pagan attains once and again to a
shallow desire towards the outside of Christianity,
AUGUSTA WEBSTER.
177
and is always pushed back by his not unnatural hate
for Christian Glaucon, is given strikingly; for he has
constantly before him the gnaving thought that that
death he meant to part her from Glaucon through
all time has in fact wedded her to him through all
time; and this thought is thrust upon him by read-
ing over and over the legend on the grave-slab,
Lucilla a sweet soul asleep in Christ.
And Glaucon loving her, more loving Christ.'
This simple legend combines the two suggestions of
what the tortured, haunted man most desires, rest
and sleep, and what he most loathes, community in
aught with Glaucon; and this antithesis of hate and
craying for rest is sustained capitally throughout the
poem.
Sister Annunciata, a less remarkable poem at
first sight than either of these, is perhaps the most
powerful and exhaustive piece Mrs. Webster has pub-
lished. Spoken at intervals through a night of self-
questioning, it reveals a history by no means unin-
teresting, and paints a character and situation inter-
esting in a high degree. The soul whose portrait we
get here is a fine, exalted, loving and ardent woman,
compelled to take the veil for family reasons, so that
her rich love for a man, being thwarted, goes osten-
sibly into a channel of religious fervour. What is
noteworthy about the piece is the complete realisation
of how a full-blooded, proud, Southern nature, cap-
UULI
178.
OUR LIVING POETS.
U
v
able of a deep and lofty affection, can school itself to
the routine of convent-life, and even deceive itself
with the idea that its affections are set purely on
* things above.' Laudable skill has been displayed
in showing how 'Sister Annunciata,' passionately
looking back on her earthly lover, yet deems herself
Christ's bride, and how a certain fervid eloquence
and divers hallucinations (called visions) impress the
simple sisters with the idea that this is some most
holy and awful woman come among them,— while
those qualities are in fact but manifestations of the
finer womanliness that she has attempted to crush
out of herself. The work hardly bears cutting for
samples; but it is well worth careful reading.
The two most considerable poems among the Por-
traits are A Castaway and The Manuscript of Saint
Alexius—the one a careful analysis of a modern wo-
man's fall and failure to rise again above her worse
self, the other a masterly delineation of that almost
devilish fanaticism of some of the early Christians,
who sought, at all hazards and sacrifices to other peo-
ple, to save their own souls. Of the other poems in the
collection, two are classical, Medea in Athens and
Circe; while the remainder are close transcripts from
various phases of modern life and thought, not too
subtle to be easy to apprehend, not too uncommon
to be of general interest, and not too commonplace
to be poetic.
AUGUSTA WEBSTER.
179:
The conception of Circe as a woman waiting and
longing for the arrival of some master-man, who shall
claim her by virtue of superiority, is finely worked
out; and very cleverly put is her plea that those who
have become beasts under her witchcraft are but what
they were by nature ::
"Too cruel? Did I choose them what they are ?
Or change them from themselves by poisonous charms ?
But any draught, pure water, natural wine,
Out of my cup, revealed them to themselves
And to each other. Change? There has no change;
Only disguise gone from them unawares :
And had there been one right true man of them
He would have drunk the draught as I had drunk,
And stood unchanged, and looked me in the eyes,
Abashing me before him.'
This and the other classical subject are treated
with greater nicety and care of minute workmanship
than is usual with Mrs. Webster; and yet they are
perhaps less charming on the whole than The Hap-
piest Girl in the World, the soliloquy of a simple
sweet girl who is just betrothed, and is finding faults
with her happy self—too fully satisfied with her joy
to be quite sure that she is as much disturbed in
heart as a loving maiden should be. Delicate shades
of feeling like this require a tender and delicate hand
to treat then pleasantly; and looking at the want of
fineness in some of Mrs. Webster's work, it is almost
a surprise to find so sweet and wholesome a sentiment
So sweetly set forth as that in the passage beginning
with-
180
OUR LIVING POETS.
2
..Oh våin and idle poor girl's heart of mine,
Content with that coquettish mean content !
He, with his man's straight purpose, thinking 's wife,"
. And I but that 'twas pleasant to be fair. ...
The many various moods of self-deception, both in-
nocent: and guilty, have afforded Mrs. Webster a
fruitful ground to work upon; and this particular
poem of a girl who loves perfectly, yet blames herself
for imperfect loving, reaches a climax in one beau-
tiful little utterance that we cannot but accept thank-
fully, even if doubting how much it may be natural.
I mean the following elaborate and perfect metaphor:
"I am the feathery wind-wafted seed
That flickered idly half a merry morn,
Now thralled into the rich life-giving earth
To root and bud and waken into leaf
And make it such poor sweetness as I mas;
The prisoned seed that never more shall float
The frolic playfellow of summer winds
- And mimic the free changeful butterfly;
The prisoned seed that prisoned finds its life
And feels its pulses stir, and grows, and grows.
Oh love, who gathered me into yourself,
Oh love, I am at rest in you, and live.'
One is almost tempted to smile at the dear incon-
sequent girl who can find such rhetoric to express her
entire devotion, and yet cannot quite forgive herself
the small measure of her love as compared with her
lover's love. But as the default of realism here is.
merely in the amplitude of the rhetoric, and not in
the state of contradictory feeling depicted, it is not
the critic's part to find fault; for what would any
poem be but mere prose unless its rhetoric were
1
D
AUGUSTA WEBSTER.
181
TO
ampler than the phraseology natural to the situation-
chosen ? : :
• There are yet two works by this author not to
be passed over in silence. I do not refer to the wea-
rišome, long, loose, formless piece of verse called
Fairies' Chatter, or the carefully written pseudo-idyl-
lic tale Lota: of these two, published with A Woman
Sold, the one is mere desultory rhyming, the other
a rather disagreeable little story in tolerable enough
blank verse. I do not even mean A Woman Sold, a
fairly complete analysis in two dialogues, or Anno
Domini 33, a poem wherein the monologue of Judas
Iscariot seems to me to stand out in vulgar shallow-
ness from among work that is neither very good nor
very bad. The two remaining productions that really
claim attention are the translations Mrs. Webster has
made of Prometheus Bound and Médeci.,'· If to these
two excellent translations be applied the high test of
inquiry whether, as the works here stand, they are
poems of supreme beauty, it will I e to be confessed
that they fail under such test, ut as literal ren-
dering has been the translator's 'st aim,'we need
not be so exacting; and the two poems are certainly
quite enjoyable as poems. The 'Medea is really a
valuable contribution in the absence of any rendering
by a great poet; but the nearest approach to a high
quality of verse is not lyric in a great way.
The present version of the Prometheus, equally
..
..!
;
.i..
.
.
.
...
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OUR LIVING POETS. .
with all other new versions, must of course be com-
pared with Mrs. Browning's magnificent rendering of
that magnificent work; and Mrs. Webster's falls no
less short of Mrs. Browning's than do all other English
presentations of the mighty conception of Æschylus.
Mrs. Webster's literality is doubtless useful, but lite-
rality of word is a matter of small account as com-
pared with essential faithfulness and large beauty;
and it does not seem necessary to give more than one
extract from each of the versions to show how futile
has been the attempt to supersede Mrs. Browning's,
--if indeed such was the aim of the more recent ver-
sion; and it is not easy to know what is the aim of
re-translating a foreign work unless it be to supersede
former translations. I cannot find for comparison
a fitter passage than the last words of the chained
Titan: Mrs. Webster gives them thus,-
Lo, in very deed, no more in mere talk
Does the earth now l'ock,
And a cavernous boom of thunders rolls near,
And the forked fierce blaze of the lightning glares out,
And whirlwinds chase 'round the eddying dust,
And the blasts of all the winds leap abroad
At war each with each in contending gusts,
And the sky and the sea are mingled in storm-
Such tempest from Zeus in our sight strides on
Towards me as though to daunt me with fear.
Oh mother mine, thou revered one, Oh sky
That bear'st in due round light common to all,
Do ye see me what wrong I endure ?'
Mrs. Browning gives the same passage thus,
AUGUSTA WEBSTERTY
183
.
• Ay! in act now, in ord now no more,
Earth is rocking in space.
And the thunders crash up with a roar upon roar,
And the eddying lightnings flash fire in my face,
And the whirlwinds are whirling the dust round and round,
And the blasts of the winds universal leap free
And blow each upon each with a passion of sound,
And æther goes mingling in storm with the sea.
Such a curse on my head, in a manifest dread,
From the hand of your Zeus has been hurtled along.
O my mother's fair glory! O Æther, enringing
All eyes with the sweet common light of thy bringing!
Dost see how I suffer this wrong?'
There seems to me to be no less a gulf here than
that fixed for ever between the mediocre and the
supreme. But Mrs. Webster's Prometheus is cer-
tainly more of a poem than any other English one
except Mrs. Browning's.
The relative merits of poets do not form alto-
gether an agreeable subject; but there is a sufficient
ground for a few words here on the position of Mrs.
Webster when compared with such of her country-
women as have followed the art of poetry seriously.
I have more than once seen claimed for her the first
place among the women-poets of England; and this
claim seems to me to be so absurd a heresy, that
I feel bound to record a contrary opinion. To my
mind we have in the poetic literature of this cen-
tury no less than four female names of greater weight
than hers. To enter on a serious defence of Mrs.
Browning's fame against such a competition would,
I think, be about as imbecile as to vindicate for
184
OUR LIVING POETS.
Shakespeare a place above that occupied by Mr.
George Boker; and another woman-poet whom we
lost prematurely by death, Emily Bronte, had, I
think, a far larger share of genuine poetic faculty
than Mrs. Webster has yet shown. Among the liv-
ing, it is surely only a little less absurd to suppose
any one really rates Miss Rossetti below Mrs. Web-
ster than to think Mrs. Browning could be seriously
held to take a lower rank; and, although it is easy
to understand how the unusual strength of mind and
analytic acuteness displayed by Mrs. Webster might
give rise to an idea that she is a poet far superior to
one so delicately sweet as Miss Smedley, I cannot
but deem the last-named lady, rather than the for-
mer, entitled to rank next to Miss Rossetti among
living English poetesses. It is not difficult to dis-
cern beneath the anxious finish and retentiveness of
Miss Smedley's work a greater native force of mind
than that which Mrs. Webster has deployed, as it
would seem to its full extent; and that Miss Smed-
ley's verse has more of external charm than Mrs.
Webster's is scarcely less evident than that Mrs.
Webster's has more surface-evidence of strength than
Miss Smedley's.
VII.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
" Then the fair woman, that was his soul, spoke again to him,
saying:..." Chiaro, serrant of God, take now thine Art unto
thee, and paint me thus, as I am, to know me: weak, as I am,
and in the reeds of this time; only with eyes which seek out
labour, and with a faith, not learned, yet jealous of prayer. Do
this; so shall thy soul stand before thee always, and perplex thee
no more.” And Chiaro did as she bade him.'—D. G. ROSSETTI.
6- These fair Spring blooms,” ve said, “shall surely form
Fair fruit when Summer's through; and men shall see
A vintage mellower than the vines, and be
Made glad with a fruit-wonder rich and warm
From summer sun-rays !”—What, then, was the swarm
Of gnating insects that kept bare the tree
These many barren autumns,—so that we
Have prayed no rain for it, and feared no storm?
Nay, but what matter when the fruit is found
This autumn ? Wherefore search the why and how
Of these blank years of waiting, when this year
Is bored with its proud burden ?-Each fruit here,
Of these late fruits, is red and ripe and round,
"Like the sweet apple upon the topmost bough !" ?
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
10
IF any one had undertaken a year or two ago the
task of writing on Mr. Dante Rossetti as a poet, he
must have been at some little pains to show why that
title was claimed at all, and how it was that a poet of
high order was living among us, known only to a
few friends, and perchance some scattered friends of
friends. His is a name that has been barely more
than a tradition even to persons exceptionally inter-
ested in what concerns the fine arts : men have known
that the name represented a power in at least two of
the arts; but except for a chance look at a picture in
a private collection, or a furtive perusal of a poem in
a defunct magazine (or perhaps even in manuscript),
there have been no good means open to the curious
generally whereby to judge of the nature and quality
of the power in either art. To those, however, who
are intimately acquainted with the Preraphaelite
movement from its commencement, he has always
assumed the position of 'father of the movement,
both in painting and literature, notwithstanding the
comparative vagueness of idea conveyed by his name
1
188
OUR LIVING POETS.
to a public in whose ears the names of Holman Hunt,
Millais, Ford Madox Brown, and others, are sounds of
no small significance. Whenever Mr. Dante Rossetti
has come before the public, he has been at least re-
markable; and the task of appraising anything one
could lay hold of, produced by him, has been a more
than ordinarily pleasant one for such critics as feel
the irksomeness of the commonplaces to which so
much contemporary criticism is necessarily devoted.'
To a public not allowed a fair opportunity of
judging for itself concerning his pictorial ability, it
must be not a little annoying to have his mysteriously
enshrined talents as a painter frequently cast in its
teeth, — more especially when it is considered that,
from what we do know, the vague encomiums passed
about would seem to have good foundation. Yet,
beyond the limits of a small circle, he is to all in-
tents and purposes. palpably.connected with the art.
supposed to be his forte by.no other means' than a
few, book-illustrations, wherein the designs are in-
adequately; rendered by faulty English woodcutters.
Still, however rendered; these designs show the price-
less attainments of delicate fancifulness and original
creation. There is not in one of them any trace of
commonplace or conventionality.
For judging of Mr. Dante Rossetti as a poet, the
public really had, if they chose to avail themselves of
it, tangible and to a certain extent substantial ma-
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
189
terials ; but even here artist and critic have been
under a disadvantage ; for the productions of his
which were at the same time mature as to period of
publication and substantial as to quantity were only
translations, though of the highest conceivable order
of rhythmic translations. The greater number of his
original poems accessible before the middle of 1870
were published as long ago as 1850, quite in the in-
fancy of the Preraphaelite movement; and his book
of translations from the Italian, The Early Italian
Poets, came out in 1861. Some of these translations
showed in the matter of execution a long advance on
the early pieces; and when it was announced on the
fly-leaf of the book that a volume of verse by the
translator was preparing for publication under the
title of Dante at Verona and other Poems, there
really seemed to be good reason for expecting some-
thing more than ordinarily meritorious. Intimate as
Mr. Rossetti had been with the subject of Dante,
whose Vita Nuova, with a group of minor poems, is
among the pieces translated in The Ecirly Italian
Poets, it was rational enough to suppose that the
subject of the great exile at Verona would be at all
events feelingly dealt with ; and that was one im-
portant element of success. Another lay in the evi-
dent facility of versification and imaginativeness of
thought elsewhere displayed by the author. But here
again the public curiosity was doomed to remain un-
190
OUR LIVING POETS.
slaked, for nine years! During that period The
Early Italian Poets was the only poetical production
of Mr. Rossetti that could be readily obtained: that
excellent book remained ' in print in its first edition
until quite recently, though now out of print; but
the fugitive pieces of an original nature were not to
be had without some little seeking, being scattered
through a few numbers of defunct magazines, gener-
ally forgotten, though treasured by a few and eagerly
sought by a few more. Most of these poems are very
short-many of them sonnets; but none, however
short, are without the great essential of poetry—a
beautiful form well freighted with thought or feeling.
The four most considerable of them are My Sister's
Sleep, The Blessed Damozel, The Burden of Ninevelt,
and The Staff and Scrip.* The two first named are
penetrated alike with an exquisite sense of the pa-
thetic, and both are executed entirely in the same
method; but while The Blessed Damozel is essen-
tially medieval in its general tone and many of its
ideas, My Sister's Sleep is on a subject less remote
and more widely appreciable. In The Blessed Damozel,
one tells of his lady in heaven, and of her thoughts,
sayings, and doings while waiting his arrival from
* The Blessed Damozel was first published in The Germ (1850),
and afterwards in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856),
with considerable modifications. Ny Sister's Slecy was published
in The Germ, and The Burden of Nineveh and The Staff and Scrip
in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
191
the land of the living; and although the subject is
one of much apparent difficulty, the poet has managed
it so exquisitely that any cultivated person must at
once see that the result is a poem in every sense of
the word. But My Sister's Sleep is a simple death-
bed scene on Christmas-eve, and its pathos is of an
order that must come home to all who have felt or
imagined what it is to yield a loved one to the inex-
orable summons of death—and who has not felt or
imagined this ?
In both of these poems Mr. Dante Rossetti shows
—and indeed elsewhere the same remark applies to
his work—a strong sense of outward form, coupled
with great imagination : it is the same sense that
one notes in the poetry of Mr. Morris, displayed in
dwelling upon the salient externals of the subject,
whether highly imaginative or not. A poet who had
not this faculty in some degree could not of course
produce anything but vague shadows of creation ; but
Mr. Rossetti possesses it in a remarkable degree.
The Blessed Damozel is a very highly imaginative
subject—as far removed indeed from realism' in
the vulgar sense as possible; and yet, in imagining
it, the poet never seems to have lost sight for a mo-
ment of the colour and detail of his thought. The
following are the first two stanzas of the poem :
The blessed Damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
192
OUR LIVING POETS.
Her eyes knew more of rest and shade
Than waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
..No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary's gift,
. For service meetly worn;
And her hair lying down her back
· Was yellow like ripe corn.'
Without any appearance of straining for a local colour
foreign to the natural sense of the artist, this is a
picture as vivid and tender as the pure delicate angel-
pieces of Angelico ; and although it has a stronger
implication of flesh and blood than ever showed itself
through the tempera of the monk, it is yet strangely
suggestive of him. There is something calm and
pure in the thought, and a pre-renaissance simplicity,
which go almost inevitably with the name of the
great Frate. But conventual the poem is not in the
slightest degree; and in a subsequent verse we get
flesh and blood plainly enough among the attributes,
of the blessed damozel,' as conceived of by the
earthly lover, but still the purity which comes of ex-
quisite calmness :
And still she bowed above the vast
Waste sea of worlds that starm;
Until her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm,
And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.'
Here is the element we do not get from Fra Angelico,
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
193
though his contemporary Lippo Lippi did not fail in
it. We might gaze for ever on Angelico's pictures,
whether of virgins or angels, and calmness and
purity we should never miss; but one would never
suspect the bosom of one of his sexless angels of
warming anything : we come to brother Lippo
for all that-iste perfecit opus;' and Mr. Rossetti,
with lilies and vestments and aureoles held in an
almost palpable atmosphere of medieval faith, has
yet the courage to make his picture by the super-
addition of what the daring innovator of the cloisters
filled his heavenly and earthly beings with, regard-
less of the outcries of monk and prior. Having, then,
with the high daring of a true artist, conveyed the
element of real flesh and blood into the region of a
medieval heaven, Mr. Rossetti has prepared us to
hear the blessed damozel say her say, and the poem
flows without a shade of violence into words that
would be as sireet and intelligible to the ears of an
ordinary lover as the speech of a maiden still on earth
-words with love and aspiration in them, but with-
out any passion that is not exalted : her ultimate
aspiration is simple and lovely:
Only to live as once on earth
At peace-only to be
As then awhile, forever now
Together, I and he.
This conception of personal love not abated by the rare
atmosphere of a higher life, but purified, strength-
194
OUR LIVING POETS.
ened, and made perfect, is beyond praise. This is
better, more solidly satisfying, yields a pleasure less
mingled because more pure, than any ravening tirade
about 'stinging lips' and 'eyes insatiable' and beauty
that 'bites like a beast, however faultlessly such
tirade be woven into verse. One stanza of this pas-
sion-pure damozel's white thought and tender senti-
ment outvalues twenty volumes of mosaics pieced
together from the stale though rosily dyed relics of
the love that 'has no abiding, but dies before the
kiss.'
My Sister's Sleep opens with the simple and di-
rect sentence 'She fell asleep on Christmas-eve;' and
the poet then sketches in the scenery of his subject
vividly and firmly, but all with the same direct sim-
plicity. The sad interior has but three figures in it
—the narrator, my sister,' and 'our mother, who
had leaned over the bed from chime to chime. After
the interior and its inmates have been placed before
us, conspicuous in the solemn dimness of mingled
light from candle, fire, and moon, the narrator says,
• I had been sitting ap some nights,
And my tir'd mind felt weak and blank;
Like & sharp strengthening wine, it drank
The stillness and the broken lights.
Twelve struck. That sound, which all the years
Hear in each hour, crept off; and then
The ruffled silence spread again,
Like water that a pebble stirs.'
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
195
The whole dead-still action of the poem is given in
touches of deep, half-silent sound such as this; and
the whole pitch has an extraordinary muffled breath-
lessness, partly managed by the fit selection of inci-
dents of sound, and partly by the slow short step of
the measure. The mother rises at the birth of the
Christmas - day to utter the words, 'Glory unto the
newly-born ;' and here we are told that 'her needles,
as she laid them down, met lightly, and her silken
gown settled.' Meantime the sister, supposed to be
asleep, is actually lying dead, and the knowledge of
this is developed by another incident of muffled
sound :
Just then in the room over us
There was a pushing back of chairs,
As some who had sat unawares
So late, now heard the hour, and rose.'
This drives the anxious mother to the bedside, fear-
ful lest the sounds should “have broken her long-
watched-for rest;' and then she learns that her cares
avail no longer. The concluding lines are
Our mother bowed herself and wept.
And both my arms fell, and I said:
“God knows I knew that she was dead."
And there, all white, my sister slept.
Then kneeling, upon Christmas morn
A little after twelve o'clock,
We said, ere the first quarter struck,
“ Christ's blessing on the newly born !" !
Worked into the quaint rigid ballad-fabric of The
196
1
OUR LIVING POETS.
16
Staff and Scrip, which borders about as closely on the
abrupt as My Sister's Sleep does, there is the same
subtle admixture of modern delicacy with medieval
fire and intensity that one notes in The Blessed Da-
mozel. This ballad is scarcely as fine as either of
those two poems; and yet it is full of splendid poetic
qualities, and fervour is blended with simplicity in it
to a degree that is no less than startling.
The Burden of Nineveh is a poem of a different order
altogether, and as a piece of high meditation it is
among the finest of Mr. Rossetti's works, although
when first published its stately train of thought was
just perceptibly marred by some lines of a sarcastic
vein, and of a semi-comic tone. The artistic mono-
tony of the rhythm combines with the close continuity
of the thought to give the poem an elevation above
all that is sensuous or material; and there is yet a
richness of colouring in the fabric, together with a
ring of musical utterance sufficient to redeem it from
any approach to dryness. The keen retrospective
flashes awakened in the poet's mind by the sight of a
Nineveh bull-god, brought into the British Museum,
take on a reality of colour and life only surpassed by
their philosophic acumen: the solemn glance into the
future is fitly separated from the solemn retrospect
by a pause in which the poet's individual life lifts its
voice above the life of thought to assert the social
pleasures of the day's programmer
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTII
-
197
.
"That day all hope with glad applause
Through miles of London beckon'd me'-
and it is a noble conceit that is set forth in the
verse,
Yet while I walk'd, my sense half shut,
Still saw the crowds of kerb and rut
Go past as marshall’d to the strut
Of ranks in gypsum quaintly cut:
It seem'd in one same pageantry
They follow'd forms which had been erst;
To pass, till on my sight should burst
That future of the best or worst
When some may question which was first,
Of London or of Nineveh.'
It is difficult to imagine a poetic faculty more keenly
acquisitive than that which is able to grasp, in the
mere analogy suggested by the sequence of gypsum
bas-reliefs and real human crowds, the great pano-
ramic idea of human races all tending in one direc-
tion—of creeds and codes and beliefs all passing on
to the inarticulate state of things that have been and
that remain only half recorded for successive ages to
study and speculate upon. Even the Christian faith,
all-powerful as it has been, but takes its place in
the poet's panorama, and he imagines how when
• Man's age is hoary among men,
His centuries three score and ten,--
His furthest childhood shall seem then
More clear than later times may be,'
and he shall perhaps deduce from the bull-god found
in the ruins of London that we English of the nine-
teenth century were not Christians, but worshipped
198
POETS.
Ta
OUR LIVING this god. His natural smile at such an idea passes
as his deeper thought subtly restores the analogy be-
tween the external characteristics of the bull-god, and
the gross mammon-worship of average humanity, seen
in modern London no less and no more than in other
highly-wrought civilisations:
The smile rose first,--anon drew nigh
The thought: .... Those heavy wings spread high
So sure of flight, which do not fly;
That set gaze never on the sky;
Those scriptured flanks it cannot see;
Its crown, a brow-contracting load;
Its planted feet which trust the sod:..
(So grew the image as I trod)
O Nineveh, was this thy God,
Thine also, mighty Nineveh ?'
It is quite impossible to convey by the meagre
process of extraction the beauty of these poems, such
is the compact unity of tone, such the delicacy of
foreshadowing and sequence of the whole. No one
of them as originally printed is entirely free from
faults; but these are of a slight and remediable kind
- such as an occasional roughness of rhythm, and
one or two imperfect rhymes; and they have disap-
peared entirely in the versions of the poems given in
the author's collected works : doubtless the blemishes
would similarly have disappeared in a reprint as late
as 1861, for there is nothing of this sort of any im-
portance in the volume of translations of that date.
In that volume we get an admirable sense of exe-
cution. Mr. Rossetti laid down in his introduction
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
199
what he considered should be the aim of a translator
of poetry of one language into poetry of another: he
says that the 'life-blood? of rhymed translation is
that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad
one;' that 'the only true motive for putting poetry
into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh nation,
as far as possible, with one more possession of beauty;'
that 'poetry not being an exact science, literality of
rendering is altogether secondary to this chief aim;'
that 'when literality can be combined with what is
thus the primary condition of success, the translator
is fortunate, and must strive his utmost to unite
them ;' and that when such object can only be ob-
tained by paraphrase, that is his only path.' And
these principles he carried out so well, that the book
has an air of original poetry rather than of transla-
tion as usually conceived. There are of course many
sentiments and thoughts such as would at once be-
tray that the poems are of another land and time than
ours; but this merely results from the success of
another of the translator's good aims—that of giving
as complete a view as possible of early Italian poetry.
To have carried out these views in the transference
of just a few lyrics from a foreign language to ours
would have required but little sustained power added
to poetic feeling; but to do the same with a com-
pactly arranged series of poems of various classes,
including the Vita Nuova of Dante, was a task in-
200
OUR LIVING POETS.
T
L
!
volving much real artistic and, in a measure, creative
labour. If, in striving to keep a translation faithful
to the original, the translator trammels himself with
verbal fidelity, any aroma possessed by the original
must of necessity fly off, so fugitive is the external
quality of poetry. So that, even if the translator
reëndows the poem with a poetic form, maintain-
ing his verbal fidelity, the result is not a poem.
But if he first assimilate thoroughly the sense and
form of the original, and then, without regard to
words, evolve through his proper artistic faculty a
poem in the same sense and the same form, but with
a poetic character minutely (i. e. verbally and phraseo-
logically) intelligible to those whom he intends it for,
then the result is obviously a poem as well as a faith-
ful translation. Now in these translations we con-
stantly meet passages which, setting aside the thought
or sentiment conveyed, are beautiful, musical, aro-
matic (whatever you like to call it), of their own na-
ture--by virtue, that is, of the combination of their
sounds. Such a line as
Now thou hast risen like the risen sea'
is not above average for poetic thought, but it is per-
fect in construction and sound, taken without regard
to its meaning. The same sense could have been con-
veyed prosaically, and doubtless would have been so
conveyed by a literal translator. This is felt even
more strongly in many passages of the Vita Nuova.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
201
Some of the sonnets of this work, as here rendered,
are as fine as sonnets can be, as for example that
opening with the line,
'I felt a spirit of love begin to stir.'
As far as the Italian liquid fluency and musical rhym-
ing qualities can be represented in our less fluent,
less pliable, and less musical tongue, they are repre-
sented by this beautiful sonnet and many others, as
also by numerous Canzoni, Ballate, &c., found in the
collection.
The three sonnets which Mr. Swinburne tran-
scribed for his Royal Academy pamphlet in 1868 are
more perfect specimens of poetic utterance than even
these translations. Their thorough maturity and ex-
ecutive strength seem to indicate that the practice of
poetry must have been closely followed since Mr. Ros-
setti put forth The Blessed Damozel, notwithstanding
the time he is known to have devoted to painting. In
the sonnet headed Sibylla Palmifera we have the lines,
• This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise
Thy voice and hand shake still,—long known to thee
By flying hair and fluttering hem,”—
and in that headed Venus Verticordia there is one
line almost unsurpassable for music and condensed
meaning,—such a line as gives the highest proof of
poetic faculty of a lofty order : it is the fifth line of
the sestet,
"A little space her glance is still and coy;
But if she give the fruit that works her spell,
202
OUR LIVING POETS.
Those eyes shall flame as for her Phrygian boy;
Then shall her bird's strained throat the woe foretell,
And her far seas moan as a single shell,
And through her dark grove strike the light of Troy.'
The last line has been modified by the poet: it now
stands-
“And her grove glow with love-lit fires of Troy;'
but the earlier text has been followed in this and in
all other cases up to the present point, on the obvious
ground that thus far the subject has been Mr. Ros-
setti without his book of Poems. In the last sonnet
mentioned I prefer the old text, as a matter of taste;
and I may say the same of Mr. Swinburne's version
of the Lilith sonnet:
"Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve)
That, ere the Snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.
And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright net she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.
Rose, foxglove, poppy, are her flowers : for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed fingers and soft sleep shall snare ?
Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent,
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.'
In substituting at a later time the rose and poppy'
for 'rose, foxglove, poppy,' and 'soft-shed kisses' for
soft-shed fingers,' the poet doubtless followed a deli-
cate as well as an artistic bent; but it is questionable
whether the changes do not rob the sonnet of some
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
203
pictorial beauty on the one hand, and on the other of
some of its masculine force in embodying a type of
sensuous beauty as distinct from spiritual beauty.
Such was the hidden poet, concerning whose works
in verse one scarcely ever met a word in print, until,
simultaneously with a rumour that he was about to
issue a volume, the sixteen marvellous sonnets Of
Life, Love, and Death appeared in The Fortnightly
Review, and were allowed to pass almost unheeded
by the critical faculty'! But now, at length, the
long - withheld poems are, or may be, in all men's
hands; and not slow have been the printed tongues
of all men who have to do with criticism in recog-
nising nobility which it is but small merit to re-
cognise, and bestowing praise too obviously just to
fall necessarily back on the bestowers. Indeed so
promptly did the general press acknowledge the sig-
nificance of this book's advent, that scarcely a word
is left for any remaining voice to utter, the praises
of the very cover, with its quaintly beautiful 'end-
papers,' being wellnigh sung through.
At a time when most of the poetry written so
thoroughly in earnest as to carry the reader above
recognition of flaws has many flaws to recognise at
will, and when much that is finished nearest to per-
fection has for basework thoughts either worthless or
blameworthy and lamentable, it is a great treat to
come upon a volume bearing a weight of earnestness
204
OUR LIVING POETS.
in every page and a burden of bestowed care in every
line; and such a book must every reader of intel-
ligence find Mr. Rossetti's to be, even in a first
skimming perusal. From title-page to imprint no
trivial thing is to be found, and from first to last
word of each poem, be it never so small or modest,
no syllable can be detected standing in its present
position without the deliberate sanction of the au-
thor's thoughtful consideration visibly stamped upon
it: indeed it is questionable whether a comma even
or pause skulks unratified by the loving approval of
an artist too wholly an artist in soul to give the
world anything hasty or half considered, too wholly
a craftsman in words to bestow deliberate care with-
out securing worthy results. We have long ago
degraded the good word laboured' by applying it
merely to results where painful purblind casting and
recasting are but too evident; but if such word could
nowadays be applied to that luminous far-reaching
soul-inspired revision that all the most perfect poems
of the present epoch have more or less obviously
undergone, then one would fain call Mr. Rossetti's
book a laboured book. So far, however, as that word
implies want of ease and reality, or any other crime
against the comely body and lucid spirit of Art, it is
next to impossible to attach it to more than one or
two small pieces in the book; and even these would
be more accurately described as showing a slight con-
11
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
205
sciousness of rhetoric than as being really laboured
in that sense.
Besides reprints of all the poems already glanced
at, we have now the long-missing Dante at Verona,
and a great deal that is even more important; nor is
it too much to say that the whole collection is of that
rare order that commands immediate admiration in
the occult way wherein an admirable person com-
mands it: one knows at once that it is beautiful
poetry, just as one knows at once and recognises the
benign presence of a beautiful-souled person—not
by any special trait of benignity or beauty, but by the
complete absence of any saliency of feature such as
might draw the attention at first sight away from the
ensemble. But as the intuitive love for a love-worthy
person grows by near knowledge from vague to ex-
plicit, and as the heart, having got thoroughly to
itself feature by feature the nobleness of a man or
woman, communicates the same to the intelligence
in such wise that they can be clearly dealt with and
set forth with reason,-so, from close holding to real
poetry, the vague sense of shed beauty gives slow way
before defined and pinnacled beauties ; insomuch that
the mind is able to confirm by examples the intuitive
verdict of the heart, and to adduce in shapely se-
quence, if need be, somewhat of the logic of admi-
ration. This is what we have all experienced in our
acquaintance with the supreme lyre-sweepings of the
206
POETS.
Ta
OUR LIVING incomparable Shelley, filled full with fervid meaning
not to be taken in at first by any but the nearest of
kin to that great spirit;--this is what some of us
have experienced in the rugged materialism and mys-
tic sublimity of him who, across the Atlantic, still
inflates his grand throat in chanting the psalms of
democracy and manly love ; and so, in a measure,
may this be said of Mr. Rossetti's work. His is not
the bird-rhapsody, that no human heart ever poured
forth as the heart of Shelley did; nor the giant work
of hurling rocks up Olympus or filching the divine
fire for the warming and lighting of men-work to
which Walt Whitman's are the latest Titan-loins
girded; but, being filled with meaning and veiled
only with ardent beauty, his poetry has the instant
mastery that passes the pathway to the heart and
builds its memorial structures thence into the intel-
ligence; and, best of all, the structures most solidly
built thus are always the best worth building, nothing
unworthy the hands of an artist being here dealt
with, and no matter of opinion or feeling or belief
being so set forth that any dissentient can feel the
sting of offence.
With the mythology used by the Italian poets of
Dante's time much of the spirit of those poets has
passed into Mr. Rossetti's pages, doubtless through
the near communion he had with them when at work
on his beautiful volume of translations; but as this
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
207
spirit is transfigured by means of the accumulated
results of six hundred years of human life, and as
this mythology is always redeemed from staleness or
stiffness by the subtle intensity of the thoughts and
feelings portrayed through its aid, we cannot find
either the one or the other obsolete, and must recog-
nise their effects on this book as giving a very de-
sirable variety to work in a tongue so alien as ours
from the tongue of those men. Much of the volume
might be characterised as thoroughly Italian; and
for no poems so much as the sonnets of The House
of Life* have we to thank the Italian stock, in that
a graft has been grafted on our great poetry-tree, and
has come to fruit that the tree of its own force could
never have put forth. Other fruit we have and have
ever had in abundance :
The tree's bent head
Sees in the stream its own fecundity ;'
but this fruit we have never yet had; and now that
we have it, we may well
Eat it from the branch and praise the tree'-
praise the tree that yielded the graft and the tree
that took it and nourished it, and more than all on
this head the grafted branch itself. For in these
sonnets deep themes of life and love, of death and
ultimate hope, are set to a music utterly new to our
* A most important division of the book-fifty sonnets and
eleven songs towards a work to be called The House of Life.'
208
OUR LIVING POETS.
English ears, and have been thought out in a chan-
nel differing widely from the channels usually cut by
our poets for such themes: the love-sonnets have a
burning reality hardly ever attained as here without
any shade of licentiousness; behind the highest rhap-
sody-point of love may be discerned always the shadow
of earnest life; and something of the sad shadow of
anticipated death is felt through the very strength
and depth of the life-shadow. No recklessness of
love - utterance is here to mar the greatness of the
work, and no flaw of work to mar the greatness of the
theme : the heart is right, and the head is right, and
the hand is right; and the fifty sonnets are an unex-
ampled perfection: to them, considered as sonnets
and a poem of sonnets, all others in our language
must give place—not even excepting our two other
greatest works in sonnets,—Shakespeare's, namely,
and Mrs. Browning's forty-four disguised under the
title From the Portuguese.
The grounds of the supremacy claimed for these
sonnets need to be indicated. The sonnet is, of all
forms of verse thoroughly well known and adopted in
England, the most highly - civilised and artificial.
Leaving aside the question of its absolute value for
modern uses, it is evident that, when so artificial a
form is selected, it must be used with great straitness
of observance if its integrity is to be at all preserved,
and with intense delicacy and savoir faire if it is to
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
209
be preserved in ease and liberality, and with great
weight of significance if the technical beauties are to
be held together by sufficient justification of labour
given. Thus the steadiness of hand and clearness of
mind required for rounding into the invariable limit
of fourteen iambic lines some weighty matter of
thought or delicate subtlety of feeling is not easy to
overrate. To say that Shakespeare fell short of the
needful strength of hand or clearness of head were
mere absurdity. He conformed perfectly to his own
ideal; but the fourteen-line stanza in which he wrote
was not a sonnet in the strictest sense. The strict
sonnet is two quatrains, followed by two triplets or a
sestet; and Shakespeare chose to write his series in
the form of three quatrains and a couplet. Moreover,
in the sonnet quatrain the two outer lines rhyme and
the two inner lines rhyme, the second quatrain hav-
ing the same outer rhymes as the first, and indeed,
in the strictest form, the same inner ones too, as in
the Lilith sonnet (p. 202). In Shakespeare's son-
nets, on the other hand, the quatrains, which are
usually independent as to rhymes, are of the alter-
nate order, thus:
• Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.'
This very grave alteration of the form seems to set
210
OUR LIVING POETS.
Shakespeare's sonnets beyond the contest for supre-
macy; and Mrs. Browning's, though always strict as
to form and weighty as to matter--always lyric in
their beauty and musical in their sound-have not
quite the requisite delicacy and consistency of finish
for supremacy in a case where finish is so essential
an item for the comparative valuer.
The sonnet form presents great attractions to
mere dabblers in verse; and it is no doubt on this
ground that compositions of this class are not
more popular in England, where alone sonnets as
noble as those of Italy are to be found. We have a
great number of these 'poemets,' bearing no traces
whatever of the triviality of occasional verses. Mrs.
Browning's are distinctly a connected poem; and
those of The House of Life, many of them more or
less connected even now, are just as distinctly por-
tions of a far greater poem, great as that is; for,
while the woman-poet treated the course of a single
woman's love, the man-poet's work is not circum-
scribed in subject at all, as the title implies. The
songs and sonnets of the very Vita Nuova are less
thoughtful than these, less free from traces of me-
chanical influences, and, one might almost say, less
delicately musical and less grand in the weightier
cadences of those portions which are fullest of thought.
If the Vita Nuova is easier to apprehend than some
parts of The House of Life, it is not that this is the
.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTİ.
2II
clearer and that the more obscure, but that the
one sprang of the absorbing sacrificial passion of
an enthusiastic young idealist, while the other has
grown, as the ultimate work of Dante grew, under
the fruitful influences of varied life on a mature man's
whole being. A realism as nobly terrible as that
stamped all over the pages of the grim and splendid
Commedia appears in many of the songs and sonnets
under discussion, and, indeed, in much of the more
melancholy poetry of the collection-a realism not to
be confounded with puerile literalism, but the utter
reverse of that. I would note especially the manner
in which things past are presented in all the mystic
terror of their relentless continued existence, as in
the four sonnets headed Willow-wood, wherein the
speaker tells how, through the cadenced dropping of
his tears, and through the half-recognised song sung
by Love, he became
'aware of a dumb throng
That stood aloof, one form by every tree,
All mournful forms, for each was I or she,
The shades of those our days that had no tongue.'
Nothing can be more vivid and clear-cut than the
apparition of these tongueless days walking in 'Wil-
low-wood' with hollow faces burning white;' nor can
those sonnets be at all surpassed for mellow beauty
of sound that takes a colour in the mind and abides
there as a perfect thing. But a more isolated sonnet
must serve for example of the poet's great power in
212
OUR LIVING POETS.
realising mental phenomena, and throwing them into
finished figure-pieces wherein thought takes sub-
stance and substance manifests itself in sound and
colour—not where music and moonlight and feeling
are one, but where music and language and colour
and feeling are so blended as to seem one. As a
sample of this vein of work, there is no more noble
sonnet than Lost Days, wherein each wasted day of a
man's life is seen rising to accuse him of self-murder :
The lost days of my life until to-day,
What were they, could I see them on the street
Lie as they fell? Would they be ears of wheat
Sown once for food but trodden into clay?
Or golden coins squandered and still to pay?
Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet?
Or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat
The throats of men in Hell, who thirst alway?
I do not see them here; but after death
God knows I know the faces I shall see,
Each one a murdered self, with low last breath.
"I am thyself,—what hast thou done to me?"
“And I-and I-thyself," (lo! each one saith,)
“And thou thyself to all eternity!"
This fervent little poem is priceless not only for its
positive qualities, but also for its absolute incompati-
bility with any meanness or littleness of work. It
holds distinct assurances, better than any bond, that
he who wrote it would publish nothing base or even
trivial; for such a realisation of responsibility for the
days entrusted to a man will not couple with any
abuse of the hours and minutes of such days by doing
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
213
mean work in them. An artist whose ideas are thus
cut as it were with a red-hot blade on his very heart
cannot always pick and choose his subject; he must
often be chosen by his subject; but whatever that be,
we may feel sure of large affluent handling and true
human tendencies and just and masculine views of
life.
He who enters this house of life' at its first
sonnet need fear no change of essential matters when
he arrives at the fiftieth, but may pass to the remain-
ing chambers to find there the same lofty qualities,
and to go out at the doorway of the last song with
larger ideas of life and a keener sense of beauty, if he
give but good heed to what he meets. The two songs
Penumbra and The Woodspurge might, for sagacity
of observation, have passed for work by the sagacious
one of all contemporary poets; while the execution
is Mr. Rossetti's own and unmistakable. The Song
of the Bower has a pre-Swinburnian richness of colour
and sharp beauty of verbal counterpoint suggestive of
parental influence on certain compositions in all ways
less reticent than this, and published sooner, what-
ever be the respective dates of production; and in
the concluding song, The Sea Limits, we get a com-
pend of much philosophy in few words:
O
L
VU
• Consider the sea's listless chime:
Time's self it is, made audible,
The murmur of the earth's own shell.
Secret continuance sublime
214
OUR LIVING POETS.
Is the sea's end: our sight may pass
No furlong further. Since time was,
This sound hath told the lapse of time.
No quiet, which is death's,—it hath
The mournfulness of ancient life,
Enduring always at dull strife.
As the world's heart of rest and wrath,
Its painful pulse is in the sands.
Last utterly, the whole sky stands,
Gray and not known, along its path.
Listen alone beside the sea,
Listen alone among the woods ;
Those voices of twin solitudes
Shall have one sound alike to thee:
Hark where the murmurs of thronged men
Surge and sink back and surge again,
Still the one voice of wave and tree.
Gather a shell from the strown beach
And listen at its lips : they sigh
The same desire and mystery,
The echo of the whole sea's speech.
And all mankind is thus at heart
Not anything but what thou art:
And Earth, Sea, Man, are all in each.'
In passing even thus far, enough has been ex-
tracted to exhibit certain qualities of Mr. Rossetti's
poetry that have reference to texture, and whereto I
would call special attention. There is scarcely a line
quoted above that will not bear witness to a remark-
able individuality in the method of forming lines. It
is not entirely new, even to those who have never
before seen anything of Mr. Rossetti's; for traces of
the method are to be found in the pages of the poet's
sister, and also, in a greater or less measure, in
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
215
early poems by Mr. Morris and Mr. Swinburne. All
three of these younger artists have worked out styles
of their own distinct enough from the original model ;
while with Mr. Rossetti himself the particular ele-
ment in question has apparently gone on gathering
distinctness. I refer to a certain crispness of ca-
dence, which is masculine without being in the least
degree harsh, and which seems to be got by so
placing each word that it is impossible to ignore the
full weight and value, not only of small and modest
words, but also of every syllable. The manifest fall
of the rhythm brings out the little words into con-
stant distinctness; and the obvious separation of
words and syllables goes to make the fall of rhythm
manifest; but in which direction the manipulation
is felt in the artist's mind it is hard to judge--pro-
bably there is an equivalent action and reaction. The
important point in this matter of technique is that,
regarding the poems merely as models of style, their
effect will be to combat the slovenly tendency of con-
temporary writers and speakers to slur and blur their
words; and at the same time those poems show how
much true and dignified richness of line may be got
without falling into one of the salient foibles of
latter-day poets—the abuse of elision. Mr. Rossetti's
blank-verse even has no default of richness or variety,
and is yet more pure of blots and free from tricks
than that of any living artist except the Laureate.
216
OUR LIVING POETS.
0
This point naturally leads the mind to the great
monologue called A Last Confession—the only poem
of the collection that is in blank-verse.
This is in the last degree excellent among works
of the same order : as a study in morbid psychology,
pointing everywhere to issues the utter reverse of
morbid, it is subtle and wide and full of wisdom;
and as a deeply analytic poem it has this remarkable
quality—that the artist has succeeded in maintaining
throughout the complex theme a perspicuity as com-
plete as if the matter were one of mere children's
prattle. He who makes the confession is a man of
a simple nature enough-a man of pure patriotism
and true single-hearted love; but her whom he loves
he has slain in a mad moment of doubt; and his
country's cause has brought him to a premature bed
of fierce pain and coming death ; so that he is pre-
sented to us with his simple nature warped terribly
and worked across with many seams and scars. How
these things have come about, and by what dark and
thorny ways he has been brought to this plight, he
tells his ghostly confessor in snatches of reminis-
cence, always leading up to the dreadful climax of
his secret, and always, at a point of high suspense,
falling back again without accomplishing the actual
confession of the crime. Picture after exquisite pic-
ture is placed before us, and still the deed remains
for a space untold ; and even at the very last, so
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
217
strongly kept up is the repugnance to go over the
scene again in thought or speech, that the man
rushes through the account of the deed even as the
deed itself had been rushed through, and never
actually owns that he did kill the woman — only
says how he came to know he had stabbed her ;
thus:
"Have I not told you yet,
Not told you all this time what happened, Father,
When I had offered her the little knife,
And bade her keep it for my sake that loved her,
And she had laughed? Have I not told you yet?
“Take it,” I said to her the second time,
“ Take it and keep it.” And then came a fire
That burnt my hand; and then the fire was blood,
And sea and sky were blood and fire, and all
The day was one red blindness; till it seemed
Within the whirling brain's entanglement
That she or I or all things bled to death.
And then I found her lying at my feet
And knew that I had stabbed her, and saw still
The look she gave me when she took the knife
Deep in her heart, even as I bade her then,
And fell, and her stiff bodice scooped the sand
Into her bosom.'
It will be noticed that the immediate instrument
of the girl's and man's undoing is a laugh; and in
the working out of the poem it is good to note the
firm fine thread of laughter-incidents whereon the
poet has strung the tale of this dying man, into
whose very soul a girl's heartless laugh has entered
as iron, and whose brain is given up to the echoes of
a phantom-laughter that affrights him, even at the
moment of death, from the brink of that stream of
218
OUR LIVING POETS.
ghostly counsel and comfort he would fain drink of
and wash in to the healing and cleansing of his soul.
The first laughter mentioned is close to the opening :
the man comes right up to the point at once; but
breaks off with
Father, you hear my speech and not her laugh;
But God heard that. Will God remember all ?
and then plunges back into a far remembrance of the
childish laughter of the girl when he found her, an
infant deserted by her parents in time of famine :
here he ends with subtle simplicity-
• With that, God took my mother's voice and spoke,
And sights and sounds came back and things long since,
And all my childhood found me on the hills;
And so I took her with me.'
His next retreat from the point of the scornful
laugh is made to tell of the widely different heavenly
laughter of female saints seen in a bright sweet:
dream of heaven: thence he passes into a tale of how
her laughter was turned to tears once by the break-
ing of an image of Love he had bought her, the
gilded dart of which gift drew ominous first blood
from her childish hand; and the next laugh he tells of
is a light maidenly one at the thought of becoming a
woman. Then he relates how he chid her at a later
point for untimely laughter, and how she sang him
a song of peace-making--a song given in Italian and
English, and in either language the very music of
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
219
210
U
tears and laughter—a thing midway in this poem of
mixed reminiscence, and after which there is un-
mixed misery in every incident. Another laugh that
stays with the man on his dying bed is one that
came from her when he questioned her as to a trans-
fer of devotion from an Italian Madonna to one 'tin-
selled and gew-gawed, a slight German toy,' and
when she replies lightly,
She had my old thoughts,—this one has my new.'
A later - told more hideous laughter is that heard
in a nightmare, when she stands before him and
wrings out her hair, bloody from the wound in her
side, and mocks the screams he utters; but the
laugh of doom is one less ghostly: in approaching
this point of his confession for the last time, he tells
how he stopped to buy the dagger, and heard the
coarse empty laugh' of a "brown-shouldered harlot'
at a tavern-window-a laugh which comes fearfully
back to him when, three hours later, his gift is scorn-
fully rejected; for he recognises or fancies a simi-
larity between his beloved's laugh and the harlot's,
and takes the likeness as a summary of all she
might have changed to, or might change to.'
Such is the mechanism of this imagined confes-
sion, if mechanism' that can be called which has
no faintest taint of the mechanical. So natural and
unrestrained and perfect is the whole scene, that one
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does not at first notice how this laughter is made
prominent at each step in the difficult ladder by
which the man climbs to drop his heavy burden of
secret guilt; and yet the whole thing shows a deep-
ness of design as evident as it is deep, and as spon-
taneous as it is evident. Thoroughly elaborated as
the poem is, it is easy to see that neither the inci-
dents nor the thread were arrived at by painful rea-
soning, or by any other process than that real poetic
intuition concerning the nature of which critics must
be content to remain profoundly nescient. It is easy
to see that the thread of laughter was the only right
thread to lead to the high tragedy of the last para-
graphs of this poem, depending altogether on the
lightness of a girl ; but the difficulty is to appreciate
the quality of that insight which saw all this before
it was written down-insight which saw in detailed
clearness how the brain of the haunted man could
be best turned to account by using a string of its
natural reminiscences tinged with the one colour,
instead of crowding the work with supposed super-
naturalisms. There is a dreadful beauty in the con-
clusion of the scene, wherein the man sees the slain
girl clearly before him, and gives up all hope of
salvation :
Father, I have done :
And from her side now she unwinds the thick
Dark hair ; all round her side it is wet through,
But like the sand at Iglio does not change.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
22 1
Now you may see the dagger clearly. Father,
I have told all: tell me at once what hope
Can reach me still. For now she draws it out
Slowly, and only smiles as yet: look, Father,
She scarcely smiles : but I shall hear her laugh
Soon, when she shows the crimson blade to God.'
UU
The iron-handed unrelenting Nemesis of a man's
own misdeeds was never painted in more sanguine
colours than here.
· Not in this poem alone does the genius of Mr.
Rossetti manifest itself in what is weird, relentless,
and sad : there are four poems in his volume, beside
this one, fairly to be classed together as principal
poems — namely, Eden Bower, Dante at Verona,
Jenny, and Sister Helen; and there is no joy in
any one of them, except the joy in what is beautiful.
The first and last of these are not to be overrated for
their purely artistic qualities, nor are the other two
for the tender human sympathies visible throughout
their texture—the one with the sorrows of a great
wronged soul, the other with the unsorrowing name-
less victim of a wide social ill. Dante at Verona, I
must confess, does not strike me as having the dis-
tinct fitness of form notable in every other poem in
the book : there is no default of fine workmanship in
the individual stanzas; but as a narrative analysis of
the situation named in the title, the poem is hardly
as compressed as it might be. Every page is full of
fine thought finely cast; but there seems to be a
C
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slight tendency to discursiveness, an unwillingness
to lose any available material; and yet, for all this,
there is but a single verse one need care to dispense
with-that wherein the poet has attempted to render
a bitter retort of Dante's, depending for its point on
a pun that will not translate into English. Mr. Ros-
setti need not have troubled himself about Dante's
bitter pun on the name of Can Grande della Scala,
when he was able, a few pages farther on, in treating
of the triumph of the corrupt republic, to set down
the only really grand pun I remember meeting with
in the language:
* Respublica-a public thing :
A shameful shameless prostitute,
Whose lust with one lord may not suit,
So takes by turns its revelling
A night with each, till he at morn
Is stripped and beaten forth forlorn,
And leaves her, cursing her. If she,
Indeed, have not some spice-draft, hid
In scent under a silver lid,
To drench his open throat with—he
Once hard asleep; and thrust him not
At dawn beneath the boards to rot.'
This is grim enough for Dante's self, and splendid
enough; and there are but few stanzas in the poem
far lower in standard than these, while many have a
deep unrippled stillness of sad beauty very different
from this tingling brand burnt fiercely on the brow
of medieval Florence.
Of Jenny it is not easy to speak worthily: it is a
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
223
poem that almost all criticism or discussion must
misrepresent, not on account of any ineffable work-
manship such as may be found in many of these
poems, but simply because of the utter cleanliness
and manliness with which the matter in hand has
been treated. It is a monologue; and the case of
the courtesan is taken up and analysed, not from the
distant stand-point of a parliamentary or scientific
debate—not from the half-instructed vantage-ground,
or rather disadvantage-ground, of a woman’s-rights'
council-but from the near position which only one
who has seen the inside of Jenny's own room could
assume. The fact that this poem has been accepted
for what it is, a noble work of art, and that no voice
has been lifted against the situation taken for treat-
ment, shows pretty conclusively that the outcry raised
against some poetry of our day has not been the re-
sult of mere squeamishness on the part of the public,
but the natural and proper stigma of ignoble work.
English readers and critics have shown that they are
alive to the beautiful adaptabilities of subjects once
tabooed, provided the treatment be worthy of the
matter, and the matter, however sad, worthy of the
treatment. In this poem of Jenny these things are
clearly so; and, as in most works of high art, the
structure and adornments are not weakened or dis-
figured by any direct moral or didactic intention :
there is a fine dramatic feeling, a complete human-
02
224
OUR LIVING POETS.
ness, and a lofty conviction that ground another might
find unholy is holy ground to him who treats it as
such. He who must have a moral for the poem can
find one at every page—to wit, that no wrong-doer or
set of wrong-doers can ever be influenced for good by
such treatment as is usually given to lepers and such-
like. There is something exceedingly lovable about
the speaker in this monologue, who, having fallen in
with Jenny from a simple desire to dance, takes her,
tired-out, to her lodging, and lets her sink down and
rest her head on his knees, and so sits till in the
grayness of dawn the woman almost fades from view,'
and he sees in beautiful lost Jenny
'A cipher of man's changeless sum
Of lust, past, present, and to come.'
It is perhaps a question rather for artists than
for critics, how far the monologue form may be
allowed to include thoughts that are unspoken; and,
as far as I know, Jenny is the only poem of any im-
portance in that form wherein such a question is
raised. One would have said, that a monologue must
clearly be formed entirely of such utterances as might
be spoken; and Mr. Rossetti's antecedents, as leader
and founder of the Preraphaelite movement of 1848,
would have led one to suppose that his views would
not include such an impossibility as a monologue
partly spoken and partly thought: yet such a mono-
logue is Jenny. That it is not a poem of thoughts is
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
225
shown by the actual lapse of time and change of posi-
tion being indicated on the regular monologue prin-
ciple: the whole action is implied by the speaker as
taking place at the various moments of speech; and
yet at page 116 we read,
• Let the thoughts pass, an empty cloud !
Suppose I were to think aloud, -
What if to her all this were said ??—
A
clearly implying that what goes immediately before
was unspoken thought only, and could not have been
actually uttered by him who is entrusted with the
whole matter as spokesman. It seems to me that
the liberty thus taken with the form in question is
exceptionable on simple technical grounds—involv-
ing as it does an impossible transfer of the imagina-
tion from a man's words to his inscrutable thoughts.
In the other two principal poems referred to
above—both of them ballads with burdens—the in-
cantation of Sister Helen seems fitter matter for bal-
lad-work than the legend of ‘Adam's first wife Lilith,'
treated in Eden Bower. I know of no such intensity
in any ballads as exists in these two in equal mea-
sure; nor does any other composition of the class, so
far as I am aware, arrive at the same dazzling height
of finish, or the same superlative manipulation of the
burden, as is attained in Sister Helen. The slaying
of an inconstant betrayer, which this woman accom-
plishes by melting a waxen image of him before a
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OUR LIVING POETS.
flame, is set forth with equal perfection, whether we
regard the cultured imagination displayed in the de-
tails, or the loftiness of the thoughts flashing from
every turn, or the awful suspense in which the whole
attention is held from stanza to stanza, as the poet
relentlessly urges the reader through the dread sense
of something going on with heaven above and hell
beneath, and that something profoundly coloured by
mixed impulses heavenly and infernal-
Love turned to hate, between hell and heaven !'
This gulf of antithesis is further maintained by the
entire matter being carried through in dialogue be-
tween the girl and her little brother; so that while the
whole spectacle burns the eyes with the sight of a wo-
man at the preternatural fever-heat of hate for a man
once loved-hate even unto death-every verse yet
holds its own antidote and balm in the naïve inno-
cence of the child's untainted humanness. Regularly
as each incident is lifted into sight in the hands of
this unwitting infant, so does it receive its baptism
of flame at the hands of the too much witting sister;
and each time does the poet chime in with some
weighty suggestion or broad idea. No one verse is
less thoughtful than the weightiest, and none less
comely than the fairest; not one line can be detached
or dispensed with, and not one word rings a tone
higher or lower than the tone of flawless things rung
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
227
LU
on the counter of the whole soul's judgment. This is
probably the poem wherein Mr. Rossetti has placed
himself most unmistakably beyond the reach of de-
traction—this the work of all these admirable works
whereon I would prefer to base any claim left to make
for him—this the achievement I would call to witness
of the quality and scope of a poet, of whom it may
perhaps be said that he has done nothing bulky; for
the brain-force expended in such an achievement is
less easy to gauge than that expended in much pro-
duction of anything less intense, less firm of grasp,
less living and actual in pulsations of red blood. I
can only refer my readers to the volume for confirm-
ation of my views on Sister Helen; for this poem,
more than most of its fellows even, is absolute in its
indivisibility.
Throughout Mr. Rossetti's poems may be found an
ever new variety of subject, and an ever constant
presence of the author's fresh individuality of work-
manship-new thoughts always crowding the pages
in forms of unfamiliar beauty. The transfusion of
Italian blood into a newly-opened vein of English
verse is not the least among the notable accomplish-
ments of this poet; nor is it in any way the greatest,
—for the poems that are at once longest and loftiest
assert no nationality. To run a firm new fibre into
the web of the English tongue, worked over and over
as it is with splendour of great poetry, is at all times
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no small matter~nor any small matter to find a place
for a new tint on a fabric dyed through and through
as that is with colour of infinitely varying richness
and delicacy. Yet thus much Mr. Rossetti has done;
and he has done it not for an hour or a day or a sea-
son, but for the present and future of those who speak
his tongue. Many of us have long waited and wished
earnestly for some substantial public proof of what
could be done by this poet, who has been so many
years scarcely more than a poet by repute, and that
repute but a narrow one; but the recent harvest pays
for the waiting—pays for it too so richly that, when
we look at it in its fair entirety, we are tempted to
apply to it the lines of simile which the poet has
himself snatched warm from the urgent heart of
Sappho,-
· Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough,
A-top on the topmost twig,—which the pluckers forgot, some-
how,-
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.''
* One Girl, a Combination from Sappho. P. 186.
VIII.
CHRISTINA GABRIELA ROSSETTI.
• A song-bird beautiful-souled.'
A. C. SWINBURNE.
CHRISTINA GABRIELA ROSSETTI.
It has long been the custom in England to seize
upon all products of female genius, and canvass them
with a severity certainly no less rude than that with
which the works of men are handled : we find women
excluded as far as possible from open competition in
many fields of artistic labour, for which they are clearly
not unfitted, and not only excluded by moral em-
bargoes, but actually debarred by force from privileges
accorded to men. It is not difficult to understand
why this is, for in some things, “however we brave it
out, we men are a little breed;' and in this particular
there can be no doubt that there is more behind our
unwillingness to admit women to the esthetic fran-
chise than the mere fear lest our wives and daughters
should lose delicacy or refinement, become less wifely
and daughterly, through coming before the public:
as artists women do not come personally before the
public as a matter of course, and in many cases the
profession of this consideration must be a mere sub-
terfuge. In certain walks of literature we are no
longer able to hold our own against the encroach-
ments of the weaker sex:' in prose fiction they have
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D
asserted their ability so clearly and practically that
there is no longer any attempt to gainsay it; and
usually a novel is now treated simply as a novel,
though a critic sometimes allows himself to sneer at
the female authorship of a weak work, and this in face
of the fact that the very best novels of the present
day—those most richly endowed with just the cha-
racteristics which have been considered beyond the
reach of womanhood, and at the same time nothing
wanting in feminine tenderness—are the work of a
woman, though issued under a male autograph. The
case is somewhat similar in France : without compar-
ing George Sand' with 'George Eliot,' it may fairly
be said that, in the matter of style and invention, it
would be hard to find an abler French novelist than
Madame Dudevant. George Eliot, though unap-
proached, is by no means an unfollowed leader, or a
phenomenon without a pedigree and relations; and
in this particular branch of literature it only needs
time and space to show that women are no whit be-
hind men in ability.
This being the case as regards prose fiction, is
there really any reason why other walks of art, usu-
ally considered higher, should not be traversed by
women as ably as by men ? The question is a vexed
one, but at the same time it remains undecided.
Logical reasons could be adduced, no doubt, why it
is not only improbable, but impossible, that women
CHRISTINA GABRIELA ROSSETTI.
233
should obtain supremacy in epic poetry, in the drama,
in sculpture, in musical composition; and this, per-
haps, on the ground that women's minds are so dif-
ferently fashioned from men's, that they could not
possibly be brought to the severe tasks in analysis
and synthesis, and the protracted stress and strain,
which extended works in these kinds demand. The
same reasons are applicable here as in cases of poli-
tical, civil, or military employment: it has been bril-
liantly asked, "What should we do with a leader of
Opposition in the seventh month of her pregnancy?
or a general-in-chief who at the opening of a cam-
paign was doing as well as could be expected ? or a
chief-justice with twins ?—and the answer is patent
enough; but at the same time maternity does not
follow womanhood as a matter of course; and the
true grounds upon which men as a body would ex-
clude women as a body from these employments
are, I suspect, deeply seated in the heart. It would
be a severe wound to a man's feelings to see his wife
and daughters thus employed; it would seem to go
against nature entirely. Yet this is the logic that
is employed in the argument, and doubtless it
is logic; but fortunately logic is not everything:
if it were, we should have womanhood suffrage
at the present moment, and should be reduced to
the necessity of entreating our women not to use
it. No, logic is not everything; for this same logic
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OUR LIVING POETS.
would have served to place beyond the bounds of pos-
sibility such a phenomenon as the production not
only of Adam Bede, Romola, &c., but of whole rows
of good novels by women, which nevertheless exist.
Now as yet we have but one epic poem* by a woman,
and not many dramas of feminine extraction that are
worth naming; but that is no reason we never should
have more; and in the mean time we can actually show
several poets who have produced under the bewilder-
ing influence of petticoats admirable poems of many
sorts--and have asserted practically the delicious mot
of their greatest spokeswoman, “This vile woman's
way of trailing garments shall not trip me up.'
As little tripped up by feminine dress as any lady
who ever trimmed a verse is Miss Christina Rossetti ;
and although she has not produced any one work of
great dimensions, or even of great scope in small di-
mensions, her two little volumes yet constitute not
only a very choice contribution to real poetry, but also
a significant fact in the history of female literature.
Miss Rossetti shows before all things that a woman
of esthetic genius is not necessarily a wayward fabri-
cante of whatever matter comes to her hand for
artistic manipulation, but that a woman may train
U
* Aurora Leigh seems to me to be a poem of epic rank, and more
strictly an epic than any work of the present day. This may seem
laughable to some of my brother critics; but the present is not the
fit place to indulge the desire to defend my position in regard to
that grand poem.
CHRISTINA GABRIELA ROSSETTI1
235
.
herself to a special manner of workmanship, and be-
come amenable to the influences of a movement just
as advantageously as a man may. The first thing
that strikes us on going through this lady's works is
that she is a poet: this impression is the earliest, be-
cause we feel it; and the second thing which comes
forward prominently—second, because we find it out
by thinking, not feeling is that she is a Preraphaelite
poet, profoundlyinfluenced by the Preraphaelite move-
ment in literature, and perfectly conscious of certain
principles in workmanship. To say that she has at-
tained a uniform perfection in this matter of work-
manship would be rash; but it may be fearlessly said
that her works exhibit, in a greater degree than those
of any other woman-poet of her country, the sense of
execution, the sense that the words in which a
thought first suggests itself are not of necessity the
fittest words in which to put that thought before the
world, and this notwithstanding the Preraphael-
ite aim of approximating the 'actualities' of language
more nearly than is usual with poets.
There are reasons for not subscribing to the claim
more than once put forward in Miss Rossetti's behalf
to take rank beside the great Mrs. Browning. The
calibre of mind required for the production of such
works as Casa Guidi Windows, Mother and Poet, Son-
nets from the Portuguese, &c. (not to name Aurora
Leigh, the sacred dramas, and the incomparable se-
236
OUR LIVING POETS.
CO
CD
cond translation of the Prometheus), is bigger than
the calibre of mind demanded for the creation of such
poems as Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and
many of the smaller and more perfectly gem-like
poems of Miss Rossetti. Nor can I see that the
power's of expression exhibited by Mrs. Browning
were less superior to those shown as yet by Miss
Rossetti than her exhibited powers of idealisa-
tion were :-— simply, Miss Rossetti has betrayed a
keener sense of the necessity of execution than Mrs.
Browning did; not a greater executive ability, not
even as great an executive ability, for the intuitive
manipulation of Mrs. Browning is, in numerous cases,
not short of perfection; as, for instance, in many
passages of Casa Guidi Windows, in the forty-fourth
Sonnet from the Portuguese (and several others), in
A Denial, in The Measure and The Sleep, and in
numerous other instances. Mrs. Browning was a
poet to the very depth of her nature; and no one ever
had a higher or holier sense of the responsibilities of
a poet. Nevertheless she has not shown, with all
her impassioned bursts and sweet outpourings, which
attain perfection by force of passion or sweetness, the
sense that careful and dextrous manipulation is a re-
quisite of poetic art; and Miss Christina Rossetti,
without this sweeping force of passion, with a more
limited emotional range, and with a narrower area
of subject, has unquestionably shown this sense.
CHRISTINA GABRIELA ROSSETTI.
237
)
Therefore to her be all honour for being the first to
prove what, in this behalf, may be achieved by an apt
and fitting education.
It has never yet been accorded to women to re-
ceive the same education as men in many respects;
and notably deficient has been the place assigned to
artistic influence in the education, not only of vo-
men relatively, but of men and women absolutely.
Had Mrs. Browning had the exceptional bringing up
which Miss Rossetti must have had, there is no say-
ing to what untold heights she might have soared ;
but although Mrs. Browning was always more or less
a prodigy, and passed a studious childhood and youth,
we are not told, and I for one should not believe it
if I were, that her early years were passed under the
influence of other working artists. Now we cannot
but be assured that Miss Rossetti's were: her father
was a poet, and her brother is a poet: the family as
we know them display, and always have displayed, a
remarkable degree of cohesiveness; and Miss Ros-
setti, under the name of 'Ellen Alleyne,' was asso-
ciated actively with the ‘Preraphaelite brotherhood,'
in its original organ The Germ. And here, in this
admirable sense of workmanship, is the result. It
is hardly needful to remark that any amount of edu-
cation in the world would not have made Miss Ros-
setti a fine poet unless she had been one by natural
proclivities; and that she possessed at an early age
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OUR LIVING POETS.
D
a true fund of poetic imagination as well as a most
cunning ear for melody is proved by the existence of
one of her loveliest poems in the pages of The Germ.
For quiet perfect delight and full satisfaction of the
sense of beauty in sound, I know of no more complete
talisman than the four verses called Dream Land-
which is Miss Rossetti's earliest known poem : the
significant vagueness of the situation and the calm
sweet step of the measure are alike inimitable; and
it is but rarely that one can be called on to say a
verse is more perfect than are these two for instance :
• She left the rosy morn,
She left the fields of corn,
For twilight cold and lorn
And water-springs.
Through sleep, as through a veil,
She sees the sky look pale,
And hears the nightingale
That sadly sings.
Rest, rest, & perfect rest,
Shed over brow and breast;
Her face is toward the west,
The purple land.
She cannot see the grain
Ripening on hill and plain ;
She cannot feel the rain
Upon her hand.
After the lapse of fifteen years the fastidious exe-
cutive judgment of the author found no more im-
portant change to make in this poem than the sub-
stitution of
* Rest, rest at the heart's core'
for
• Rest, rest that shall endure'
CHRISTINA ryn
239
2
GABRIELA ROSSETTI.
a change apparently made because 'core' was deemed
a better rhyme than endure' for the terminals'more’
and shore.' To me this seems over fastidious; be-
cause, as usually pronounced (endyore'), the can-
celled word is a perfectly correct rhyme. But this
poem with its alteration was not selected as a special
example of the executive faculty, for there are a great
many more valuable as illustrating the remarks made
on that head. Take rather, as an instance, the little
song called A Birthday, in the volume styled Goblin
Market and other Poems : it is only two verses, and
those are not freighted with any weighty thought or
strained to the pitch of resonance by any volubility
or fire-blast of passion; but the whole sixteen lines
are full of healthy happiness and the ringing melody
of a joyful young heart :
'My heart is like a singing bird,
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an appletree,
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell,
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes ;
Carve it in doves, and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes ;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves, and silver fleurs-de-lys ;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.'
There is no posing for effect whatever, no straining
240
POETS.
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OUR LIVING of materials to meet a prescribed end; but it is not
possible, nevertheless, to fail of seeing that the se-
lection of subjects for comparison is most choice :
melody, richness, movement are in the heart of the
singer; and the bird, the fruit-laden branch, the
nautilus, must do service for imagery. This is the
very essence of maiden delicacy: the exuberance of
joy breaks forth in no unmeasured and uncomely
burst, but is poured simply, fluently, heartily, and,
with a masterly selection of expression, carried into
the next verse with equal happiness; for there again
the feminine grace with which the joyfulness is to be
attested shines with a silvery whiteness over-film-
ing the red-ripe' heart beneath. Combining thus
'music and moonlight and feeling,' this song must
be called perfect; and to attain this perfection in
treating an exuberantly joyful subject could have
been no easy matter even for one of Miss Rossetti's
delicacy and acute sensibility-seeing that all ex-
pansive passion has a natural proneness to run in the
direction of over-intensity, suggestive of personality
-a tendency to become distasteful to the reader of
average delicacy through excessive openness of ex-
pression. Reticence in songs of the affections is a
gift of great price; and here we have it. Our
sweetest songs are said to be those which tell of
saddest thought. When the divine poet told the
world this, he uttered as true a saying as ever was
.
CHRISTINA GABRIELA ROSSETTI.
241
expressed in music of words—the reason of the truth
lying partly in the more exquisite variety of senti-
ment in the region of sad thoughts than in the ro-
buster domain of happiness, and partly in the greater
ease with which a melancholy burden can be kept
sweet' than a glad and hearty strain can. This song
of Miss Rossetti’s is not a whit sweeter than many
others which she has given us: indeed there is one
in the same volume which forms an exact pendant to
this—holds just as much melody and apt grace of
symbolism-is quite as delicate in workmanship
and is in all respects a parallel to it in sweetness ;
but it is a sad song—a song which tells of love, but
which couples the mighty name of Love with the no
less mighty name of Death. Therefore it could not
in Miss Rossetti's hands have failed of delicate sweet-
ness, whereas the other might have been far less
delicately sweet without calling for censure, and so
bears away with its rapid exulting tread the palm
which might else have fallen to the lot of its more
lingering and sad-paced sister. This solemn little
lyric-melancholy-voiced as a dying swan-has in
its cadences a world of heart-heaviness :
CU
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress-tree :
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
242
OUR LIVING POETS.
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain :
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.'
This burden of remember' and 'forget,' a very
marked one, has received at the hands of Mr. Swin-
burne a much larger development in his poem Rococo
—which is, curiously enough, in precisely the same
measure. In the same metre (as we usually under-
stand the term) it is not, for Mr. Swinburne's qua-
trains have double rhymes instead of single ones.
In this respect Miss Rossetti, with all her great sense
of execution, often misses a musical effect where one
might easily be obtained. The songs just quoted are
both instances of this : though nothing is lacking in
either, and both are felt to be satisfyingly perfect, we
could yet conceive them as being rendered more mu-
sical by a delicate use of the double-rhymed quatrain ;
and the same is true of many poems in which Miss
Rossetti has used the quatrain form. What could be
done with this metre, in the way of elaborate and yet
not strained development, we learn in Rococo, a poem
of ten such stanzas, with two burdens worked alter-
nately in the last quatrain. The poem thus produced,
CHRISTINA GABRIELA ROSSETTI.
243
though not altogether gratifying in tone, has yet an
admirable effect of music and form; and, while it is
one of the most perfectly constructed of Mr. Swin-
burne's mosaics, it is also not in the least obtrusive
of its elaborate excellence. Yet the tender purity of
Miss Rossetti's gem is not cast in shadow by the
flashing brilliance of Rococo, which after all has
not this priceless purity, though not impure. This
one thing Miss Rossetti always has, added to her
technical qualities—this purified essence of purity.
* Untripped,' to revert to Mrs. Browning's phrase,
by the feminine folds of raiment, she yet never by
any movement follows the great woman-poet into any
of those pardonable though ungratifying gestures
which, in asserting this principle, disarrange the
stately fall of the folds of womanhood's i'aiment more
than most men would choose to have them disar-
ranged.
Still we have not to deal with a small-voiced,
timorous miss in appraising the poems of Miss Ros-
setti. Flesh and blood find their appropriate place
in her verses, but no more. The tattered rags of frail
humanity are not held ruthlessly up to our gaze to
assert that the poet does not shrink from her task;
and yet we feel that there is no such shrinking, and
that the poet knows and prizes her humanity. She
treats man reverently and religiously; and this much
religion we expect to find in a poet-questioning, if
244
OUR LIVING POETS.
we do not find it, his full title to be called a poet.
Miss Rossetti has, beyond this wide religion, a per-
sonal religion whereof the characteristics are discern-
ible enough ; but instead of bringing this to bear on
the general fabric of her works, and preaching what
is not of wide interest, as some weaker sisters have
done, she gives a quiet corner of each of her volumes
to certain pieces which, without the least violence of
dogmatism or narrowness of sectarianism, are yet of
a more limited range than we should care to include
under the broad denomination religious,' and are
better characterised by her own sub-title of Devo-
tional Pieces. Among dogmas styled religious, that
that' all is vanity' seems to have found special favour
in Miss Rossetti's eyes. In one of the pieces called
devotional' the whole essence of Ecclesiastes is
worked into thirteen six-lined stanzas of admirable
terseness and great beauty. Wonderfully close to the
words of the Bible, the poem (entitled A Testimony)
would probably be called a paraphrase by its author;
but it is more : it is a condensed and beautified rear-
rangement of the philosophy of the book, such as it
is; and a fragment of this so-called philosophy is
worked into a very beautiful sonnet called The one
Certainty. A very sombre tone of thought it is
that pervades these two poems; and there is not
much to covet in one's neighbour's code when such
ideas form an essential part of it. Still, the work-
19
CHRISTINA GABRIELA ROSSETTI.
245
manship is beautiful and the thought pure, however.
sad.
It is necessary to point out where the Preraphael-
ite movement has been baneful to Miss Rossetti ; for
the influence of the movement has not been an un-
mixed good. The aim of approximating the “actuali-
· ties' of language with more than customary nearness
is one which of necessity runs the artist into the shal-
lows of proximity to commonplace; and if he hold
such approximation as an ultimatum, and yet escape
partial or total shipwreck on the rocks of vulgarity or
bathos, he is an artist of great moderation and acute-
ness. To throw off conventionality and assert ori-
ginality in form and style is one of the highest tech-
nical virtues of art, because it is the only means of
large progress; and in this veneficial result of Pre-
raphaelitism Miss Rossetti has performed a laudable
part. Nor has she met with the shipwreck, either
total or partial, to be feared from unskilful further-
ance of the other aim referred to; but at the same
time she does not sail with unmitigated triumph
clear of the shallows of commonplace; and while she
is sufficiently unconventional to have infused new
blood into so conventional a form of verse as the son-
net, she has yet, in some of her more original poems,
gone far too close to what is commonplace. Among
other elements of'actuality' which she has attempted
to introduce into the texture of poetry are some few
02
246
OUR LIVING POETS.
expressions almost to be regarded as slang. Now
some words of this ambiguous class may be brought
with great effect into the vocabulary of grotesque
poetry ; but grotesque in poetry, to be at all good,
must be executed with a hand of immense strength,
and moulded into grotesqueness by means of a subtle
and homogeneous tone. In Miss Rossetti's poetry,
however, there is nothing that can be properly termed
grotesque. The tone of her writing is almost uni-
formly elegant and chaste, and seriously so; and
when into verse of this character expressions are in-
troduced which would be of great effect in grotesque
poetry, the result in the reader's mind is anything
but favourable. In the elegant poem Goblin Market,
for instance, we get passages of this nature, such as
the description of the goblin men :
• Laughed every goblin
When they spied her peeping:
Came towards her hobbling,
Flying, running, lcaping,
Puffing and blowing,
Chuckling, clapping, crowing,
Clucking and gobbling,
Mopping and mowing,
Full of airs and graces,
Pulling wry faces ;'
and so on. This is not largely successful in its
attempt at grotesqueness, irrespectively of the bad
rhyme between 'goblin'and hobbling,' and of the vul-
garism pulling wry faces;' and just as unsuccessful is
the following, with an added flatness in the last line:
CHRISTINA 247
.
GABRIELA ROSSETTI.
• One hauls a basket,
One bears a plate,
One lugs a golden dish
Of many pounds' weight.'
The poem from which this is extracted is really
graceful and serious; and fortunately there is no
great dilution of this sort in it: altogether this re-
sult of the actuality' aim is not annoying in its
frequency; but yet it occasionally leads Miss Ros-
setti to collapse into marked flatness, and that some-
times where a crescendo is wanted and apparently
intended : also some few poems have sprung from
this aim, and been published in these volumes, such
as art-lovers may well desire to see withdrawn as
really valueless—there being no clear reason for their
existence, in the matter of either recherché thought
or sentiment or fine manipulation. Such are No.
thank you John, and A Ring Posy: the first is an
ordinary enough refusal of an offer of marriage, and
is somewhat flippant as well as heartless in tone.
The argument is probably one followed out by many
a modern miss; the execution is not at all worthy
of Miss Rossetti ; and the eight verses work through
a variety of ordinarinesses to the final
"Here's friendship for you if you like; but love,-
No, thank you, John.'
In A Ring Posy there is nothing so exception-
able as this, and there is even good execution; but
unfortunately there is nothing to execute; and
TU
248
OUR LIVING POETS.
unless the verses were utter music, which they are
not, there could be no advantage in them, no reason
for their existence.
It is now five years since Miss Rossetti's last
little delicate offering of verse was issued; and her
public must be getting tired of waiting for the next:
in the mean time she has given us a sample of what
she can do in quite another walk of art, and it may be
rather interesting in this work on poetry to glance at a
novellette and a few tales by one whose mission is so
specially poetic : such a glance is the more desirable,
as in another section the converse situation--that of
a supreme novelist taking to poetry—will be treated.
Those who have known Miss Rossetti's handiwork from
the time when she produced her masterly abstract of
Ecclesiastes and her exquisite sad lyric Dream Land
up to these later years of poetic labour productive of
such results as the dirge in The Prince's Progress,
would pronounce Commonplace, the title of Miss Ros-
setti's story, as most undescriptive of anything that
lady would be likely to produce in verse or prose ;
and while Commonplace is in reality a very capital
title for the story, the whole book is just as far from
commonplace as the author's accustomed audience
would anticipate. No one will attempt to assign to
this work among novellettes the same standing that
Miss Rossetti's songs and sonnets take among son-
nets and songs, because, as we have seen, the author
CHRISTINA GABRIELA ROSSETTI.
249
LU
is simply the poet of female poets who has reached
in England the highest point of executive merit,
while one could name many women who have written
novellettes superior to Commonplace as well in exe-
cution as in conception. We have seen that, within
certain intellectual limits, Miss Rossetti's best lyrics
(and very few are below the level of the best) come
quite close to perfection—and this apparently be-
cause she has been content to sing her bird-like best
on familiar subjects of a woman's pure experience
and tender imagination : her lyrics have the air of
springing from the heart of a poet who has not
mixed much with the rougher world, and whose ex-
perience has yet garnered a bitter harvest of refined
sorrow to be breathed out in refined strains of song ;
and such a lack of rougher experience while it would
operate favourably on lyric labour would in certain
important respects operate unfavourably on the more
dramatic labour of writing a novellette. Accordingly
we find the three sisters who are the chief actors in
Commonplace, as also the accessory ladies therein,
drawn with an admirable precision and insight indi-
cative of a very acute inward and outward study of
female character and motive; while the two male
characters who should for perfect balance have been
at least as well defined, are indicated just too faintly
to take their proper standing in the reader's mind.
Furthermore this tale, in the matter of laying out
250
OUR LIVING POETS.
CU
and arrangement of parts, does not show that power
over the medium of expression chosen that the au-
thor nearly always shows when she selects verse as
the vehicle for her refined thought and exquisite
sentiment; and when that has been said there is no
more to say in detraction from the merits of Common-
place. For realising the entirety of a limited soul
and for exhibiting the eager interest of lives of
limited scope, and for doing this without affectation
or strain or exaggeration, Miss Rossetti's novellette
can only be compared to those imperishable works
wherein Jane Austen portrayed the quiet country life
of her own calm circle; but before the living author
can sit on the same bench as her great dead pre-
decessor occupies in the temple of fame she must
develop that calm splendid faculty of laying out a
book and bringing all its actors up to the same level
of unmistakable vitality that we see displayed in the
commonplaces' of Mansfield Park and Northanger
Abbey. For the rest, Miss Rossetti's little novel is
thoroughly refined in workmanship without being
petite, — thoroughly free from objectionable senti-
mentality without being bare of emotional interest.
The important characteristics and events of certain
lives are compressed into some hundred - and-fifty
pages of prose always high in tone and quality of
style, often amusing, often thoughtful, and some-
times highly artistic. She has spared us those
1
CHRISTINA GABRIELA ROSSETTI. 251
5
YO
chapters and chapters of mere padding which stuff
out to the requisite bulk so many novels with not
half so much to say, and of which the small material
must at all hazards be spread over three mortal
volumes. Her production is clean from all taint
of sensation or any other baneful thing; and, if she
has definitely abandoned that high lyric walk she has
walked in with so charming and lovely a grace,
one cannot but wish to see her often again mak-
ing longer and stronger excursions in this newer
walk of prose fiction. The tales published in the
same volume with Commonplace, though written in
uniformly elegant prose, vary greatly in scope and
quality. Four of them are altogether unimportant;
one called The Lost Titian, a brilliant sketch of
artist life in Venice, is very interesting ; Vanna's
Twins is a charming and pathetic little bit of quiet
life at Hastings, but much too short and limited;
while a story called The Waves of this Troublesome
World has in small the fine qualities of Common-
place, applied a grade lower down in the social scale,
the scene being among fisher - people (at Hastings
also). The genuine human element, happily prepon-
derant, is admirable in this tale; but the piece has
a purpose injurious to the artistic effect, on account
of its uneasy consciousness and narrow sectarianism.
The moral of the story is—' You should not leave
“the Church of England to marry a methodist pho-
252
1
Y
OUR LIVING T
.
POETS'tographer and become a methodist yourself; but if
'you do, and your husband and child .both die, you
'must take those facts as gentle chastisements of the
'good shepherd whose will is that there be but one
'fold, and you must return accordingly to the bosom
of the established Church. This is the only point
for serious objection in the whole book; and even
this didactic sin is of a very mild nature.
There is one region into which Miss Rossetti's
prose carries her better than her verse does—that
region, namely, situate between the semi-ridiculous
and the semi-pathetic that may be entered with
admirable effect in prose but which it is both difficult
and hazardous to essay in verse. In verse, once and
again, she has attempted as already noted to walk
steadily there, but not with success : in this volume
of tales, however, there are numerous instances of a
certain half grotesque simplicity of incident treated
with a naïveté that makes the reader ready to laugh
at first and ends by moving him profoundly. There
is a very pretty sample of this in The Waves of this
Troublesome World, when Miss Rossetti's methodist,
who, in justice be it stated, is a particularly fine
fellow, is about to quit Hastings—his unavowed but
evident suit dismissed by the father of the girl he
loves. He meets the said girl by chance on his way,
bids her good-bye, and tells her his reasons for de-
parture, somewhat to her surprise, and also explains
CHRISTINA GABRIELA ROSSETTI.
253
how he was not sure she would say no,' for all her
father had told him.
"Again he said, "good-bye;" but Sarah said, "Stuff! you know,
John, I can't answer 'Yes' or 'No' till you ask me something."
So in the field-path John asked, and Sarah answered. Then
from gate to gate along the steaming fields, whilst haymakers
rested and birds sat silent in the noon heat, they two walked,
talking earnestly.'
There is a good deal of this sort of thing in the
chief story, and nothing of the obviously didactic sort;
but whatever Commonplace may yield of pleasure
and profit, it is a very sad reflection that there is no
power in society to compel the author back into that
path she has followed to such admirable purpose.
Let us hope she will go back of her own free will,
and delight us once more with some of her imperish-
able lyric masterpieces.
IX.
COVENTRY PATMORE.
The perfect preciseness of thought and observation, the deli-
cate tournure, alternately gay and sober, and the gnomic sagacity
which make many passages in his poems live in the memory of all
appreciative leaders, should have earned by this time a respectful
indulgence for the facile platitude into which he too often falls.'—
J. BURNELL PAYNE.
COVENTRY PATMORE.
MR. COVENTRY PATMORE'S name is noteworthy as
connected with a marked divergence from the ori-
ginal Preraphaelite ideal in poetry. This ideal, as
set forth in the printed proclamation of the brother-
hood, was calculated to do a great deal of good in
combination with the downright earnestness and
fervid intellectuality of some of the brothers; but we
all know how impossible it is, especially in art, to
lay down laws which shall be similarly binding on all
who profess belief in them—consequently how little
real coherence there can be between a number of
works produced by different hands. Any novice who
might be told that Mr. Coventry Patmore was a Pre-
raphaelite poet would stare aghast if the informant,
after giving him samples of Mr. Patmore's work,
should then turn to the poetry of Mr. D. G. Rossetti
and say, 'This also is Preraphaelite poetry. The
principle recognised by the brothers, that “a rigid ad-
herence to the simplicity of Nature’is to be ' enforced'
in writing poetry, and that poems are to be 'con-
ceived in the spirit, or with the intent, of exhibiting
a pure and unaffected style,' seems clear enough at
258
OUR LIVING POETS.
first sight, and is certainly wholesome at second,
third, or any other sight; but after the first glance
the question suggests itself, What is Nature ? And
again, What is to be understood — contemporary
Nature, or Nature more primitive ? And after that
again a more sinister suggestion arises,—Whether in
laying down rigidly that one will accept only such
things of one's own or others' writing as are of. a
pure and unaffected style, it may not possibly come
to pass that an affectation of unaffectedness—a cloudy,
muddy, or impure struggle after purity—should su-
pervene? If such suggestions are borne in upon the
mind of the outsider, how much more potent must
be the influence of the strong individuality of fervent
artist-spirits in setting aside, by idiosyncrasy of in-
terpretation, anything like a law meant to be bind-
ing! Thus, while Mr. Coventry Patmore might con-
ceive of Nature as an entity seen in perfection of
simplicity in Sarum Close, heard and scented in per-
fection of simplicity in the rustle of Honoria’s silks
and the fragrance of her cambric handkerchiefs within
the deanery parlour, Mr. Woolner, another distin-
guished Preraphaelite, might find it hard to conceive
of the same entity as dissociable from fresh meadows
and ideas remote from the paraphernalia of modern
courtship. Thus also, while Mr. Coventry Patmore
might think no affectation existed in talking of gems
and loveliest cheer' as an Elizabethan lyrist might
COVENTRY PATMORE.
259
.:
have talked, Mr. Woolner might deem the absence of
affectation to be best shown in straining after such a
simplicity of introduction as "I love my lady; she is
very fair.' But such persons as understand an un-
affected saying to be a thing said quite naturally, or,
in speaking of poetry, a line shaped as it came burn-
ing from the poet's very soul, would fail to see these
two samples as other than very affected indeed, though
both come from poems of high merit. Mr. Coventry
Patmore has published nothing which comes nearer
to executive perfection than the little poem in The
Geri whose sole defect is the introduction of gems
and loveliest cheer.' But neither this nor two other
sufficiently charming poems of Mr. Patmore's in the
same collection would it be easy to trace to the
hand which afterwards produced The Angel in the
House--a work wherein the author had set himself a
certain task, concerning the accomplishment of which
posterity must pass the final verdict; for whether the
poem be or be not eventually set among unachieved
tasks, its indisputable excellences are too prominent
to admit of its being quite slighted by the writer's
own generation.
The hand that produced The Angel in the House
is far more clearly discernible in the volume of poems
put forth by the author in 1844, and several of which
are reprinted in a modified form in that exquisite
specimen of cheap literature the fourth edition of The
260
OUR LIVING POETS
Anyel in the FIouse.* In the four principal poems
of the 1844 volumc, namely The River, The Wood-
man's Daughter, Lilian, and Sir Hubert (whereof the
last two are itow rechristened The Yew-Berry and The
Falcon), one sees the same inordinate love of minor
detail that becomes a wearisome annoyance in the
larger work; but in these early pieces, full of vigor-
ous youthful notions on life and love, the detail is
more of that always delightful order best described
as spiritual landscape-work. These poems literally
teem with sweet clear-cut reminiscences of open-air
life, and every trait is subtilised and intensified by the
admirable fitness of it to exhibit or appeal to some
frame of mind higher than the listless enjoyment of
sound and colour. Some of the rerses would be
master-pieces but for the frequent raggedness of exe-
cution. Some of the smaller poems are master-pieces;
and I cannot forbear to insert here a nameless one
which the author has forborne to include in his popu-
lar edition, though he reprinted it in a modified and
inferior form in the volume containing Tamerton
Chuch-Tower :
I knew a soft-eyed lady, from a no ble foreign land;
Her yords, I thought, were lowest when we walked out, hand in
hand:
I began to say, “ God pleasing, I shall have her for my bride."
Bitter, bitter, bitter was it to me when she died !
* Macmillan & Co., 1866, one volume 18mo.
COVENTRY PATJORE11
261
.
In the street a man since stopped me: in a noble foreign tongue
He said he was a stranger, poor, and strangers all among.
I know your thoughts, yet tell you, World, -I gave him all I had.
But I-I'm much the visest;-it is you, O World ! that's mad.
He stared upon the proffered purse; then took it, hand and all.
0! what a look he gave me, while he kept my hand in thrall!
And press'd it with a gratitude that made the blushes start;
For I had not deserved it, and it smote me to the heart.'
In this collection of work done before the planting of
the Preraphaelite banner the chief influence trace-
able is that of Browning and our great woman-poet:
the style of the four chief poems has a wonderful re-
semblance to that of Mrs. Browning's earlier poems,
such as Lady Geraldine's Courtship, The Lay of the
Broun Rosary, A Romance of the Ganges, &c.; though
eren Mrs. Browning (then Miss Barrett) never rivalled
Mr. Patmore in the wilful and daring unfinish of
these his early poems. Browning's influence is seen
principally in The TVoodman's Daughter, wherein
some not very startling incidents of A Blot in the
’Scutchcon (published the year before) are adopted,
together with two of the names, Merton and Gerald
(for Mertoun and Gerard)—while Maud stands in-
stead of Mildred and is not so very far off it in sound.
Midway in manner between those poems and The
Angel, but nearer to that than to those, stands Ta-
merton Church-tower: the 'romaunt' tone has quite
faded from Mr. Patmore's work there; and he has
struck into the path of contemporary triviality (or, to
262
OUR LIVING POETS.
nin
ci
use a milder and perhaps correcter word, colloquiality)
of speech that finds its worst perfection in Sarum
Close and the deanery parlour. The double-rhyming
ballad metre of Tamerton Church-Tower', with its neat
glibness and unflagging briskness of step, though not
easy to adapt to solemnity of theme, is less opposed
to solemnity than is the stock metre of the Betrothal
and Espousals ;'* and although the poet seldom has
any weight of melody at his command, this poem has
some very fine passages, blended so well with its
sprightly and not inelegant diction that no incon-
gruity is felt. There is a masterly piece of fore-
shadowing near the beginning, at the point whicre the
friends are shown as waiting, midway on a journey,
in expectation of a storm:
“The string of rooks had travell’d on,
Against the southern shroud,
And, like some snaky skeleton,
Lay twisted in the cloud.'
This grim emblem of death is hung in the vision of
the youth who is hurrying eagerly to see a girl whom
he has never met and yet knows he shall love; and
this, with the emphatic and solemn mention of the
sea, near the end of the journey,
"In front, between the gaping heights,
The mystic ocean hung,'
suffice, with the assistance of a few other touches, to
take off the brusqueness of the surprise, that must
* See extracts further on.
(
1)
COVENTRY PATNIORE.
263
11
otherwise have seized the reader, on coming to the
dreadful tragedy of the poor girl's death while on her
marriage tour (for of course the youth's dream of
love comes true). The description of the storm in
which these hapless young people are caught while
out in a pleasure-boat is graphic and powerful in the
extreme; and yet, when one gets to the end of it,
and reads
The sea fell in from stern to protr
And Blanche, my Bride, was drown'd,'
there is after all a certain suddenness of shock for
which, it is clear, we have to thank the difficulty of
the poet's excellent light craftsmanship for adapta-
tion to deeply tragic or momentous subjects.
The poet's task in The Angel in the House, as
far as one can understand it, was to carry the high
tone of poetic treatment into the almost unploughed
land of married life and married love. The love
chosen almost invariably for treatment in literary art
has been love before marriage, or illicit love after
marriage; and even in the epics of modern times-
to which title contemporary fictions have a certain
claim—the interest, so far as these books relate to
love properly so called, and not to adultery, murder,
and sudden death, centres generally round the obtain-
ing of the woman or man desired, and not round the
life with that woman or man. This would have been
a noble achievement for any poet-to have shown by
a
264
POETS.
TIX
OUR LIVING practical demonstration that the true interest of life
begins with the early years of marriage, to grow
greater and greater up the hill and down the slope
again to death, instead of beginning with the first
flush of passion and finishing at about the middle of
the honeymoon. This latter has certainly been a
pretty general conception of the interest of love in
literary art; and why so it is very hard to say pre-
cisely and conclusively. Some part of the explana-
tion doubtless lies in the more vivid material action
to be obtained from a courtship than from a marriage,
and from the consequently greater difficulty in ren-
dering poetical treatments of married life thoroughly
poetical and truly interesting. The poet who selects
for analysis and delineation the relations of two young
persons who become acquainted with each other, ' fall
in love,' and gradually work through the various dif-
ficulties till they reach the married state, has obvi-
ously a moderately large range of material incidents,
as well as psychical phenomena, to select from;
whereas, by the time the pair have become one, the
most striking of the material incidents usually ac-
cepted as interesting have been used up; and the poet
who chooses to take his subject in hand at this stage
is thrown more on his powers of analysis of character
than on those of representing action, unless he be-
take himself indeed to the tragic treatment of con-
nubial faithlessness. This has of course been often
COVENTRY PATMORE.
265
LLLLS
done, and not seldom nobly done; but the new sub-
ject open for Mr. Patmore, and attractive to him, was
the faithful love of man and wife—what fast young
women and gay young men of the present day might
term the humdrum existence of a couple of married
fogies. The orthodox poet of love, as hitherto known
to us, has rung the changes on the various phases of
passion not at first requited, and dauntlessly winning
its retard, -on the various misunderstandings be-
tween youth and maiden leading to all sorts of pleas-
ing and interesting miseries on either side, or both,
-on the many provoking interferences of parents
and guardians, and the still more provoking inter-
ferences of poverty, or of pride that regards as poverty
anything less than wealth. But all these fruitful
fields are closed to the man who takes up two lives
at their point of union, and depicts them from that
point. Instead of these, he must content himself
with plucking his fruits in such fields that average
youth will cry upon him as uninteresting to the last
degree, although, if he be sufficiently powerful in
imagination, sufficiently keen in analytical instinct,
sufficiently genial in sympathy with a noble married
love, he may, with a proper amount of faculty more
strictly executive, rise to the production of a kind of
poetry that will show to sobered fathers and mothers
of families that their life also is picturesque and has
its poetic sublimity, --that they also may attain to
LU
LUL
266
OUR LIVING POETS.
the setting of the homely incidents of household ex-
istence to a music transcending in calm intensity the
ruffled depth and heat of young passion-music.
As regards the executive faculties, which would
be absolutely necessary for the flawless ennoblement
of so serious a subject as the psychical contact of
man and woman in daily life together-a subject so
easily lapsing into mere platitude as the routine of
married life in its more material aspect—as regards
the limits within which it would be needful for a poet
to confine himself to avoid the rendering of all these
things eminently commonplace, the clearest law a
critic can lay down is That the fabric of the work be
such that no line, nay no word, should be open to
the charge of redundancy, or even of not being indis-
pensable. Every poem, and above all every poem
dealing with subjects of difficult delicacy, should bear
à weight of appropriateness in each word; form
should never be sacrificed to the conveniences of
thought, nor thought to the conveniences of form,
and every turn should carry its own convicting bur-
den of earnestness.
Are these things so with The Angel in the House ?
I think not. The volume embodies numerous ster-
ling thoughts on the relationships of man to woman,
and of woman to man; but it has also been thrown
open as a refuge for many desultory platitudes which
seem to have suggested themselves to the author's
COVENTRY PATNIORE.
267
.
mind as worthy to be embodied in strips of lyric-
what shall one say? Well, it is useless to try to
generalise on this point, for the quality of The Angel
in the House at its best is high,—at its worst, miser-
ably low. Mr. Patmore seems to have worked under
a somewhat unusual disturbing influence—a struggle,
namely, between fine instinct and propriety of lyric
feeling on the one hand, and, on the other, a l'ecog-
nition by the intellect that the homely and common-
place elements of life, thought, and speech are to be
sought out and set in order.' I am impressed with
the idea that, when he followed his genuine instinct,
he produced those many dainty little pieces that show
how some slight incident, of no great picturesque-
ness, has its poetical side if viewed in the light of a
delicate mind; and that it was when he wrote with-
out spontaneity of feeling that the many disfigure-
ments were produced, for the sole use, as I cannot
but think, of teaching the impossibility of giving
poetic beauty to things that are utterly trivial and
prosaic.
Mr. Patmore appears to have laboured under the
impression that a part of the poet's mission is to say
smart things, and make the most of all those little
unimportant brilliancies that come flashing upon a
wakeful intellect at every turn in thinking out a sub-
ject; and to meet, seemingly, these requirements,
the two books' composing Part I. of the work,
268
OUR LIVING POETS.
namely. The Betrothal and The Espousals, were laid
out in the most eccentric manner—the short lyric
spurts of narration forming each canto' being always
introduced by other short lyric spurts called Preludes,
of a didactic character and of about the same aggre-
gate size as the narrative portions themselves. In
the two books' of Part II., Faithful for Ever and
The Victories of Love, this dreadful form was aban-
doned for that of letters in Huidibras-metre, written
by the various actors in the lyric narratives of Part I.
The fifth prelude of the first canto of the first book of
the first part (O how ineffably barbarous !) ends with
a beautiful aspiration beautifully expressed :
Thou Primal Lore, who grantest wings
And voices to the woodland birds,
Grant me the power of saying things
Too simple and too sweet for words!'
And surely nothing less than the conviction that the
power sought had somehow been bestowed could pos-
sibly have so far robbed the acute Mr. Patmore of
discrimination as to permit him to write many things
afterwards written. What shall one think of this
that follows ?
While thus I grieved, and kiss'd her glove,
My man brought in her note to say,
Papa had bid her send his love,
And would I dine with them next day?
They had learn'd and practised Purcell's glee,
To sing it by to-morrory night.
The Postscript was: Her sisters and she
Enclosed some violets, blue and white; .
COVENTRY PATMORE.
269
.
Y
S
She and her sisters found thom where
I wager'd once no violets grew;
So they had won the gloves. And there
The violets lay, two white, one blue.'
Very neatly done, be it noted; and no doubt to the
heart of the lover these small matters of invites and
postscripts and glove-wagers and violets are 'too
simple and too sweet for words.' Why then try to
find, of all things, poetic words for them, and fail so
egregiously? When the gardener's daughter' gives
the rose to the youth entranced before her beauty, we
feel a weight in the masterly way wherein the giving
of the gift is pieced into the modest dimensions of a
perfect fabric; and we understand what the Laureate
meant we should understand—the marking of an
important stage in the suit, the granting, or at least.
the not denying, of the first boon craved. But these
other glove and violet matters come in merely as part
of a desultory, gossipy poem, and one can only,
looking at the manner of saying, accept them for
gossip. '
But in this same work Mr. Patmore has got infi-
nitely beyond these things, and has shown so deli-
cately how slight touches of life may be made poetical,
that the flaws of his book, so many and so great, are
the more tantalising. It is difficult to over-praise the
cunning simplicity with which the going on to the
beach (immediately on arrival at the seaside after
marriage) is touched:
270
OUR LIVING POETS.
I, while the shop-girl fitted on
The sand-shoes, look'd where, down the bay,
The sea glow'd with a shrouded sun.
"I'm ready, Felix; will you pay?”
That was my first expense for this
Sweet stranger whom I call'd my Wife.
How light the touches are that kiss
The music from the chords of life!
Her feet, by half-a-mile of sea,
In spotless sand left shapely prints;
With agates, then, she loaded me,
(The lapidary call'd them flints ;)
Then, at her wish, I hail'd a boat,
To take her to the ships-of-war,
At anchor, each a lazy mote
Black in the brilliance, miles from shore.'
Those two stanzas are perfect in their way. They
reach the standard of beauty without affectation and
with naturalism, and bear the traces, not of rapid
transcription of laxly-thought ideas, but of the care-
ful—perhaps half-conscious-weighing of words and
compression of ideas to be found in all good poetry,
and found, paradoxically enough be it spoken, in
combination with perfect ease. The words 'shop-
girl," "sand-shoes,' 'pay,' and 'expense,' unpoetical
words all of them, bear each its own peculiar burden
of poetry as here employed, and never fell into the
order they stand in but with that rapid and fervent
thought which poets undergo in poetising. And there
are numberless far better things than this scattered
through the poem, though it takes no greatness of
shape or completeness of scheme when looked at as
a whole. If Mr. Patmore had given us a book about
COVENTRY PATMORE.
271
(D
a quarter of the length of The Angel in the House, if
he had never stooped to indulge in gossipy detail
told off-hand, if he had never let a verse go from him
without watchfully compacting it and guarding it from
outgrowths of the mushroom order, if he had been
able to forego the indulgence of writing clever pieces
of discursive prose-in-verse, and if the Angel had
been admitted into the House near the beginning of
the work, without all the ordinary tedious courtship
business,—then his true ideas on married love, his
delicate intelligence of certain of the shallower depths
of female character, might have sufficed to insure the
result being held hereafter to mark an epoch in the
history of poetry.
THOMAS WOOLNER.
• Art, driven out with ignominy, will yet return, and there is
nothing so artificial as artlessness.'-J. BURNELL PAYNE,
THOMAS WOOLNER.
VI
MR. WOOLNER's one poem, My Beautiful Lady, is a
truly beautiful book: there need be no doubt as to
what verdict posterity will pass on it; nor have I any
scruple in applying to it precisely those criteria where-
under The Angel in the House strikes me as falling
short. It is a book whose every turn does carry its
own convicting burden of earnestness. The critic
may fairly say that, of the fabric of the work, no por-
tions are open to the charge of redundancy or of not
being indispensable; that as a general rule the work
does bear a weight of appropriateness in every word;
and that in it thought is never sacrificed to the con-
veniences of form, or form to the conveniences of
thought. It is in many respects the direct antithesis
of Mr. Patmore's work: we see in My Beautiful Lady
à severity without coldness, a simplicity without com-
monplace, a warmth of colour and detail without
fumes and twaddle, and a great firmness of texture.
To such readers as are unacquainted with the
book, it may be said that in form it has a certain
parallelism with Maud and In Memoriam—not, be it.
observed, in the matter of execution, for there Mr.
276
OUR LIVING POETS.
Woolner at his best stands distinctly apart from the
author of those works : the parallelism is in this,
that, whether regarded as a lyric outbreathing of
experience, or as a dramatic rendering of invented
situation and soul-life, the poem of the sculpter is,
equally with Maud and In Memoriam, a series of
versified thoughts and feelings pertaining to one per-
sonality, and setting forth the passage of that person-
ality through a considerable space of time. In variety
of versification it assimilates Maud, though in matter
of craftsmanship not standing for a moment in com-
petition with that superb work; while, in smallness
of action, langeness of intellectuality, and depth of
personal feeling, it rather assimilates sufficiently the
other noble work named to suggest the idea that it is
a veritable threnody for a real lost love. The pass-
ages which strike me as the most highly valuable
are those wherein the Preraphaelite tone is at its
strongest; although a matured mind has given ma-
turity to even those portions, in touching out of them
some peculiarities which, in their first stage as known
to us, were not seen as beauties but merely as pecu-
liarities. There are portions of later birth altogether
in which Preraphaelitism is barely traceable, and
especially blank-verse passages, paying tribute to the
mosaic manner of the Laureate's best idylls. These
passages are full of original thought and individual
expression ; and if one values them less than the lyric
THOMAS WOOLNER.
277
passages, it is because they recognise a code of crafts-
manship that seems to set less readily into the cur-
rent of Mr. Woolner's genius. They have somewhat
the air of a man's comment on his earlier self; as if
the first fervour of youth and youthful art, which
made it possible for a man to select his art-course,
had been crushed out, and, if reawakened, turned so
strongly into other channels that the desire to create
fresh forms of poetry again had not asserted itself,—so
that the comment on the former self must come to
us in a form perfected meanwhile by another poet, of
an entirely distinct order from the poets of whom
Mr. Woolner at first aspired to be one, and was onc.
These blank-verse passages are full of beauties;
and with no slight to them, one may deem more costly
the utterly original manner and tender matter of the
lyrical portions. It is impossible not to admire senti-
ment such as the following, so set forth :
'It much behoves us all, but chiefly those
Whom fate has favoured with an easy trust,
They keep a brille on their restive speech
And thought: and not in plunging haste prejudge
The first presentment as the rounded truth.
For true it is, that rapid thoughts, and freak
Of skimming word, and glance, more frequently
Than either malice, settled hate, or scorn,
Support confusion, and pervert the right;
Set up the renkling in the strong man's place;
And yoke the great one's strength to idleness;
Pour gold into the squanderer's purse, and suck
The wealth, which is a power, from their control
Who would have turned it unto noble use.
And oftentiines a man will strike his friend,
278
OUR LIVING POETS.
By random verbiage, acuter pain
Than could a foe, yet scarcely mean him wrong;
For none can strip this complex masquerade
And know who languishes with secret wounds.'
The passages referred to are the general introduc-
tion, a special introduction to the First Part, headed
Love, and the whole of the Third Part, namely, two
sections entitled Years after and Worl. Years after
is an idyll in form, and a very charming and thought-
ful one; and the whole of the blank-verse portions
are full of fine thought and feeling well set forth ; but
there are other passages which stand between these
and the lyric portions of My Beautiful Lady, as hav-
ing in themselves a strong lyric element far removed
from the style of idyllic poetry—such, for instance,
as the section called Moon, after the pulsating rap-
ture of the accepted lover has been allowed to settle
down from an unclassifiable metre to an inspiration
in iambics addressed, lover-like, to the wind:
• Whisper deliciously the trembling flowers :
O could I fill thy vacancy as I
Am filled with happiness, thou’dst breathe such sounds
Their bloom's should wane and waver sick for love.'
But the most beautiful and most lyric passage comes
properly as the climax and justification of all this;
and it might, for luxuriant adoration and music of
loving, have occurred in an Italian love-song rather
than in a northern production by a worker in marble :
THOMAS WOOLNER.
279
* For Love's own voice has owned her love is mine;
And Love's own palm has pressed my palm to hers;
Love's own deep eyes have looked the love she spoke :
And Love's young heart to mine was fondly beating
As from her lips I sucked the sweet of life.'
Without intending to be impertinent, I crave in-
dulgence for the observation that, in this almost per-
fect passage, the word 'fondly' and the double ending
of the fourth line appear a little intrusive. The word
'fondly' wants weight, and the double ending breaks
unity; whereas both things would have been avoided
had the line stood, 'And Love's young heart was
beating to my heart. Such a slight flaw is only too
well worth noting, because this kind of poetising can
never by possibility be charged with the gossipy pla-
titude laid at Mr. Patmore's door, nor of the headlong
production of commonplaces and crude so-called natu-
ralisms put to the count of the same poet. The tex-
ture of this verse is carefully guarded against that
obtrusive realism which is generally a mere shelter
for slovenliness—a pretext for verse-writing when the
writer is in a common prose mood—an excuse for
stringing blethers up in rhyme for fools to sing,'
instead of waiting with patient earnestness on the
footsteps of the Muse, or rather of the poet's own
soul, till such time as real, vital, fiery poetry be trod
out in an atmosphere of necessary rhythm. When
that happy time of production does come, the real
poet-he who is a poet in his inmost heart, and not
280
OUR LIVING POETS.
by sole virtue of a faculty to sing a little — holds
himself firmly in order, and sets his judgment to
keep a guard over his more fervent emotional na-
ture; and it is then we get verse that is worth the
getting.
Now when Mr. Woolner's lyric mood has come
upon him, the weight of his judgment seems to have
set in the direction of giving the form of his verse an
air of almost negligent simplicity: his singing has
taken the most obvious cadences, and intricacy seems
never to have ventured near him. And yet withal
there is an artistic cunning in the very nakedness of
his versification-a nakedness suggestive at times of
work in marble that is simple and grand and white,
as in these stanzas, for instance :
• How grand and beautiful the loro
She silently conceals,
Nor save in act reveals!
She broods o'er kindness; as a dore
Sils musing in the nest
Of the* life beneath her breast.
The ready freshness that was known
In man's authentic prime,
The earliest breath of time,
Throughout her household ways is shown;
Mild greatness subtly wrought
With quaint and childlike thought.'
My Beautiful Lady sustains a quality quite as high
as this throughout its lyrical portions, and not unfre-
* Here again severity seems slightly impaired by the redund--
ant syllable.
THOMAS WOOLNER.
281
quently rises far higher in many ways, as in the al-
most fantastic delicacy of the section entitled Her
Shadow-a section combining Mr. Woolner's unfail-
ing thoughtfulness and unflagging tenderness with a
very sweet conceit. In walking out with his lady the
lover is affrighted by some suggestions of her shadow;
in returning homeward he is at peace, her shadow
having fallen forgotten behind; and in loitering to-
wards the porch, where there is a dial formed of a
figure of Psyche, he pauses in an ecstasy over the
twin shadows of Psyche and his lady cast on the
flower-edged gravel way.'
Still, of the treasures of this volume, the most
costly are, perhaps, those two sections which came
forth in 1850 in The Gern. The first of these pieces,
published under the name now borne by the whole
book, tells of the lady's perfection and of her lover's
suit; and the whole is fraught with a finely-blended
chivalric medievalism and Wordsworthian naturalism
-still guarding that peculiarly cunning nakedness
of versification noted above. The same may be said
of the other piece, originally put forth as sole pendant
to the first, under the title Nſy Lady in Death, thich
it still keeps. The first portion is as delicate in its
warmth as work by Miss Christina Rossetti, and as
unmistakable in its sense of execution; and the loyer's
avowal is very finely given. The final verse of this
is highly suggestive :
282
OUR LIVING POETS.
* The rest I keep: a holy charm, a source
Of secret strength and comfort on my course.
Her glory left my pathway bright;
And stars on stars throughout the night
Came blooming into light.
It is instructive to compare the original version
of these two sections with the version of the book :
there are in the two Germ poems several uncouth
realisms which, though highly valuable for their deep
and warm sincerity, added nothing to the beauty of
the pieces, and have been modified. The last verse
of the first section appears in The Germ thus:
" The rest is gone ; it seemed a whirling round-
No pressure of my feet upon the ground:
But even when parted from her, bright
Showed all; yea, to my throbbing sight
The dark was starred with light.'
The abandon of youth that confesses the utter con-
fusion of the moment's rapture in a successful suit,
when
'Each breast svelled with its pleasure, and her whole
Bosom grew heavy with love,'
contrasts finely with the mature : canniness'implied
in the words, the rest I keep,' &c.
As the book stands now, many tender and beautiful
things are inserted between tho suggestive conclusion
quoted above and the section My Lady in Death ;
and, after that section, the idea of his Lady's posthu-
mous influence, so finely foreshadowed in the stanza
“The rest I keep,' &c., receives a very full development.
THOMAS WOOLNER.
283
But the simple beauties of the lover's joy and rap-
ture in his living lady are less musical, perhaps, than
the simple beauties of his sorrow in deeming of her
as dead. The music of sorrow is never exhausted; and
almost every true poet appears to rise to his highest
beauties in dealing with grief, whatever altitudes he
may attain in the treatment of joy. The Lover's Com-
plaint remains to us as the most richly musical of
all the poems of our mightiest man ; the Ode to the
West Wind exhibits in the tumult of its mighty har-
monies' a deeper, fuller, more antiphonal concourse of
words than is usual even in the work of the supreme
singer Shelley; and Mrs. Browning never produced
anything more perfect to the ear than the words of the
dying Catarina to Camoens, and tho sad-toned Son-
nets from the Portuguese. It is even so that the se-
vere melody of Mr. Woolner attains its upper limit
in the saddest section of his sad poem. I extract
the two following stanzas from that section :
Grass thickens proudly o’er that breast,
Clay-cold and sadly still,
My happy face felt thrill.
How much her dear, dear mouth expressed!
And now are closed and set
Lips which my own have met!
Her eyelids by the damp earth pressed !
Damp earth weighs on her eyes;
Damp earth shuts out the skies.
My Lady rests her heavy, heavy rest.
To see her high perfection sweep
The favoured earth, as sho
With welcoming palms met me!
284
OUR LIVING POETS.
How can I but recall and weep?
Her hands' light charm was such,
Care Tanished at their touch.
Her feet spared little things that creep;
“For stars are not,” she'd say,
"More wonderful than they."
And now she sleeps her heavy, heavy sleep.'
Mr. Woolner has not chosen untouched matter
to work upon. He has not, as Mr. Coventry Patmore
has, attempted to tread out a new track in respect
of subject; but has struck into the good old path
of unwedded love and sorrow for the loss of the be-
loved, and has reached a bourne concerning which
there is no doubt, instead of resting from his labours
with a dubious cloud hanging over the result, and
with certain ugly features of such result only too in-
sufficiently shrouded. The falling of a poet's choice
on one or another of two noble subjects is matter for
neither praise nor blame; and yet the difficulty of
Mr. Patmore's subject was so much greater than that
of Mr. Woolner's that, had the former done as well
as the latter, a critic might easily have justified to
himself the award of a higher meed of praise to him
whose path was most beset with stumbling-blocks.
Nevness of sphere with perfection of art must ever
command unlimited kuĉos: so also must a new
perſection of art elaborated in an old sphere. Crit-
ics need never foar to sin by giving too hearty com-
mendation to a poet of true originality and fresh
method, even if they may be aware of a poetry that
THOMAS WOOLNER.
285
7
D
shall be higher than that they are praising. Only a
very little poetry ever comes into being unoppressed
by the existence of greater verse of old; but we have
not, therefore, a right to slight what our age vouch-
safes to us, and sulk at humanity at large for not
evolving another Shakespeare, or a second Æschylus,
or a new Dante: “for Nature brings not back the
Mastodon, nor we those' men. Mr. Woolner's poetry
is pure, real, vital, individual. It has its points of
affinity with certain other poetry; but it does not
lose itself over any man's borders. Wordsworth is
the man of all others for whom the originating of
Mr. Woolner's poetry might by possibility be impro-
perly claimed, simply by virtue of the common aim
of 'returning to nature'—the aim which has charac-
terised so many great reactions in art; but Words-
worth's natural simplicity,' as every one knows,
betrayed his great mind into many tediousnesses
(to use a mild word); and the most charming lyri-
cal results of his yearning after the real may be
set beside much of My Beautiful Lady, without
casting a shadow over the originality of the sculptor's
way of holding by nature. The peculiar artistic
nakedness of melody already dwelt and insisted on has
no note borrowed from another man : therefore Mr.
Woolner stands in his place among the men whom
the critic of verse delighteth to honour; and it is hard
to say what he might not have done in poetry, had not
Sculpture stepped in and claimed him as her own.
--
XI.
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.
• King Solomon.-I pray thee counsel me where with to beguile
the time.
Attendant.--So please my Lord there be but now come to the
town certain companies of minstrels; whereof they that make the
goodliest music keep not their mouths from lewdness of speech ;
and they whose words be wise and wholesome make not the good-
liest of music, though they be excellent craftsmen.
King Solomon.-Admit them that be discreet and sage of speech;
for sweet-sounding lewdness is verily a hidden leprosy, and he that
singeth wiseliest singeth goodliest in the ears of the wise.'
Solomon, a Mystery-Play.
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.
THE name of Mr. W. B. Scott is very well known to
the publicat least to a large section—as connected
with various matters in the domain of art; but it is
perhaps in that walk wherein he most excels that he
is at present least appreciated. As a painter, as a
critic, as a biographer, as an etcher, and as a poet,
his name has been more or less before the public
these thirty years and more; and it seems to me that
his poetry is almost more remarkable for subtle quali-
ties of imagination, piercing insight, and extreme
tenderness in dealing with nature, than his beautiful
imaginative and poetic etchings are for delicacy of
execution. For while it is hard to find in these times
etchings approaching his in the exquisite success with
which fine pictorial imaginings are embodied so as to
set forth the thought symmetrically and emphasise in
mere black and white the variety of textures,-it is
at least as difficult to find verse dealing with high
themes with insight and daring equal to his. That
his poems have had an influence on younger poets is
unquestionable ; and that those poems should not be
at present within easy reach of the public is both
astonishing and regretworthy.
(D
1
290
OUR LIVING POETS.
In the year 1838 he published a notable little
volume containing two poems, Hades, or the Transit,
and The Progress of Mind, an Ode; and while both
poems bore marks of homage done to the genius of
Shelley, these marks were only such as added beauty
without suggesting dependence, while the muscular
intellectuality and lofty imagination of the verses
was such as bore the most emphatic witness of the
advent of a true original poet. Indeed originality
and breadth of view are the characteristics that
strike first and most distinctly on taking up any-
thing of Mr. Scott's; and in his poem Hades this
is neither more nor less so than elsewhere. But
it may be confessed at once without reserve, ra-
ther than left for the reader to find out (as he will
further on), that this poet's subjects are often of
an order unlikely to appeal to the popular taste.
Moreover, so that his thought be fine and noble, as
it always is, he seems at times to think it no great
matter whether he clothes it in the best words he
happens to have in stock or re-dresses it from time
to time in fitter words than the first; and this
gives some of his works an air of nonchalance which,
though an earnest of wholesome independence, is
not an unmixed good, because it sometimes leaves
a little roughness or ruggedness of expression. In
1846 Hades was followed by a more important work,
The Year of the World, a Philosophical Poem on
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.
291
IS
Redemption from the Fall, and of both these poems
it may be said without offence that they are too
subtly intellectual for all their collected beauties to
appeal very far beyond the range of those in whose
lives poetry is a vital and indispensable reality.
To such select circle these fine works, precious in-
deed and matter of much delight, may always be re-
stricted in their direct influence; but for the later
volume of Poems by a Painter, issued in 1854, one
may with fair probability predict a warm welcome,
should the author please to republish it at this time
when poetry is fast reasserting its old claims and
reconquering the place in the popular mind so long
almost entirely usurped by the trashy fiction of the
day.
Hades, from any point of view an extraordinary
poem, opens in a strain sufficiently obvious in its
manner of cadence to indicate that Shelley held over
the soul of Mr. Scott just that inspiriting but unim-
portunate sway that he held over all the fine poets
who followed immediately in his wake, as traceable
in their works; and the thought expressed in this
opening betrays enough of the vatic exaltation of the
seer to show at once that no slavish imitation-of any
models the most exquisite-is to be expected here:
The great Tree of Life with its lustrous flowers,
Sprang from the nurture of Death's black showers.
From the dead worm the insect grew;
For still decay creates anew;
292
OUR LIVING POETS.
And the great Spirit changeth none,
While Death, the formless god, alone
Ministers beneath his throne ...'
This poem furnishes the key-note of a 'sane and sa-
cred' harmony, reiterated in different forms through-
out the poet's pages, and perhaps best characterised
as a manly recognition of the benignity of death.
The philosophic mind, so seldom blent in fulness
with the poetic mind, can see the true greatness of
that inevitable term of personality that is so dread &
stumbling-block in the minds of those who look at
life from the point of view of pure enjoyment, and
regard with a pagan sadness all that is not enjoy-
ment; and, with the exception of Walt Whitman,
there is no poet of our day who has expressed so
large and brave a view of death as may be drawn
from the aggregate of Mr. Scott's poems. In Hades
his ideas on this subject scarcely show in maturity:
though the poem betrays a firm will to grapple with
the subject and owns no abject possibility of defeat
for aught so grand as a human soul, it ends with
shadowiness and peradventure. The quaint situa-
tion chosen (if' situation' anything so unreal can be
called) is the awakening, by the angel of death, of
three newly-buried men—a Mussulman, a Christian,
and a Jew—who are hurried together through a weird
phantasmagory of human sights and sounds, mixed
with others of a purely ideal order; until at last their
wail to
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.
293
Sutterly cease to be,
Nor live in the throes of memory,'
is stilled by a blessed swoon of music;' and the
poet continues :
• The Wanderers beneath that melody
Slept with delicious joy away.
And what was the song
That bore along
These spirits with a power so strong ?
Would I could repeat the lay
In the light of upper day;
And unwreath both warp and woof
Of this web of conscious life,
And tear all sensuous thoughts aloof,
And all entanglement of strife;
Then weave it again with the amaranth flower,
And dye it with nepenthè bloom,
That man might know not sorrow's hour,
Nor fear the gods beyond the tomb!'
It would be idle to say that the poem maintains
throughout the level of beauty reached here; for
there is just a little disappointment even in passing
from this point to the imminent close. Serious and
deep as is the frame of mind the poet had to set
forth, we yet find at the end of the poem a sample of
the perversity Mr. Scott not unfrequently displays in
the matter of form. One would have expected the
peradventure of the last strophe to have been set
forth with beauty equal to any beauty in the poem;
and the awkward quaintness of some of the closing
lines tries the exacting sense of sound and comeli-
ness.
· The Year of the World is one of the most am-
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OUR LIVING POETS.
bitious of poems composed in these days. The meta-
physical and mystical doctrines which are here set
forth in parable cannot ever recommend themselves
to any beyond the few persons who care to blend
with poetic enjoyment somewhat of the 'intellectual
gymnastics' involved in all metaphysics. Even to
the exceptionally thoughtful nowadays, metaphysical
thought, at its simplest, is not greatly acceptable ;
and this because intellectual man is fast passing en
masse from the metaphysical to the positive sphere
of thought. Yet one may agree perfectly with Mr.
Scott, that the subject of his philosophic poem, 'the
descent of the soul from a simple and unconscious state
into the antagonistic and concrete, and its reascent
—or the readjustment of the human with the divine
nature, .... is less a subject for the analytic than
the imaginative faculty.' Nor is it possible that an
imaginative faculty such as Mr. Scott's should be
exercised on such a subject without striking out in
its path numerous fine trains of thought, and leaving
the burning mark of poetry on many a noble senti-
ment. Add to this, that the scheme of The Year of
the World is one of the largest and most daring ideas
that a poet ever undertook; for the book sets forth in
parable no less a matter than the progress of the hu-
man soul, and is vitalised by an ardent faith in the
perfectibility of man's nature. But while this sub-
ject is treated with great power and much beauty of
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.
295
ornament, there are certain matters connected with
the poet's philosophic stand-point, which, being
purely matters of individual conviction, do not ne-
cessarily fit in with one's view of things, however
warmly one may admire the poem : thus, when
Mr. Scott says that the readjustment of the human
with the divine nature is the profound idea of all
religions and philosophy,' I take leave to dissent
altogether from him; because it is now well known
that at least one religion has been constructed and
pretty considerably preached without the assumption
of any divine nature to adjust human nature to, and
because the idea in question, doubtless fundamental
in most bygone religions, belongs rather to the emo-
tional nature than to the intellectual nature, and
must be totally disconnected from any philosophic
synthesis ignoring all forms of theology. Philo-
sophy, as conceived nowadays, requires the support
of science; and all that is unscientific, or even non-
scientific, is fast passing out of the category of ideas
held to be philosophic. What is too subtle and mys-
tical to be apprehended by any faculty but the ima-
gination, passes out of the intelligence, and is only
guarded in the heart by an appeal of great force and
fervour, or by what is more powerful than that, the
weight of custom. There is in The Year of the World
much fine thought that is too subtle for easy appre-
hension by the purely logical faculty, and which cer-
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OUR LIVING POETS.
tainly has not custom to fight on its side; so that,
with all its beauties and notwithstanding the clear
severity of its style, the pith and essence of the con-
ception would be almost sure to elude the receptive
faculties of the average brain, unless the poem chanced
to strike upon the emotional nature with great fervour.
The delight of transit from the subtle and mystic
to spheres of clear and lucid thought, apprehensible
without difficulty, and without offence to the exacting
sense of the real, may be experienced in passing from
the attempt to apprehend, fully and feelingly, The Year
of the World, and plunging at random into Poems by a
Painter. Nor does Mr. Scott in any sense sacrifice
loftiness of tone to reality when he comes down from
the treatment of such an ambitious scheme as that just
glanced at : rather do his meditations take an added
loftiness from greater accessibleness, as for instance in
the grand poem called Death, and in the exquisite
little idyll Green Cherries, -one of several studies
from nature in blank verse, showing what fine and de-
licate workmanship Mr. Scott can clothe his thoughts
in when he pleases. For a poem whereof the central
thought is that
"We retain
Deepest impressions from most trivial things ;
They are the daily food God serves us with—
nothing could be more profoundly appropriate than
the cunning finish and dextrous simplicity of the
following piece of open-air work:
T
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.
297
· All over bench and table, ground and sward,
The young green cherries lay, yet overhead
Glittering like beads they still seemed thick as leaves
Upon the boughs. And young green apples too
Scattered by prodigal winds peeped here and there,
Among the clover. Through the black boughs shone
Clouds of a white heat, in the cold blue depths
Poised steadily, and all about them rang
Those songs of skylarks. Other sounds were there ;
The click mistimed of hedge-shears; the brave bee
Passing with trumpet gladness; and the leaves
Hushing against each other. Soon this way
Along the further hedge-tops came the shears ;
Two wielding arms assiduous and a face,
The prickly screen disclosed. Far down the line
By slow degrees went shears and arms, while I
Marked the still toppling twigs, until at length
They passed beyond the fruit-trees, and I turned
. To other themes.'
In such poems as this, The Artist's Birthplace, and
some others, one recognises Mr. Scott's sympathy with
the growing Preraphaelite movement which shared his
long-cherished aim of close adherence to nature and
total rupture with conventionality, and which at the
same time, whether consciously and intentionally or
not, erected fresh and anti-conventional standards of
beauty. As Mr. Rossetti's earliest poems clearly
show, no idea could be further from the Preraphaelite
conception of returning to nature than any idea in-
volving the sacrifice of beauty; and it is only in those
disciples less sumptuously endowed than he that one
finds beauty gravely sacrificed at times to naturalism :
nothing could be more sane than the Preraphaelite
ideal; but all who held it were not equally gifted
with those powers and perceptions requisite for keep-
CU
298
OUR LIVING POETS.
ing within the sacred bounds of beauty the embodi-
ments of any ideal whatever. Mr. Scott, in throwing
the weight of his genius into the movement, had some-
thing to gain as well as something to yield. Senior
to any man concerned in the movement, he no doubt
yielded to some of the men who have brought about
such splendid results somewhat of the sober ballast
of a mental equipage more grave than is compatible
with the vital fervour of a youthful esthetic propa-
gand, while he seems to have drawn from contact with
some of these fervent young artists a more exacting
sense of propriety in diction.
The faculty of giving a modern piquancy of flavour
to thoughts or themes or situations in reality archaic
is largely associated with all our Preraphaelite art;
and this fact is significant because it implies that,
after all, nature and reality are ever shifting criteria,
and are conceived of very much according to the
tastes of the artists who may please to plead them in
explanation of forms adopted. The very poets who
have cried out for more nature and actuality have
been the foremost to enter into a fruitful sympathetic
alliance with those medieval artists who deviated as
far from actuality as Raphael and his school did,
only in an opposite direction. Fra Angelico and
Sandro Botticelli and Benozzo Gozzoli, and many
more early Italian artists, are living influences trace-
able this day in much that is produced by the Pre-
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.
299
raphaelite artists, whether with pen or with pencil ;
and yet it is very doubtful whether, the elements of
reality being gathered in first from these noble old
artists and then from Raphael and his school, and
set in opposite scales, the scale of the former would
not kick the beam. Still the sympathy in question
is indubitably healthy and beneficial to modern art,
because of the harmful conventionalities which have
been handed on and on by meagre followers of the
tradition of Raphael to followers more meagre still,
until the imitators of imitators have brought to
pass, from generation to generation, what can only
be traced to the original source through the exercise
of the purely imaginative faculty.' It is this dege-
neration from a noble original that has turned the
highest artist-souls of this day towards those old
artists of pure sentiment and exquisite child-sim-
plicity and keen love of a nature that they knew but
little by scientific processes of mind, yet had so
wholly by heart; and it is through a deep correlation
of two arts that we also find a strong early Italian
infusion in the Preraphaelite order of poetry with its
independent off-shoots, and find the old ballad style
of poetry brought into use again, endowed with a
richness and subtlety for which the accumulated re-
sult of centuries of thought and feeling is to thank.
The contemporary ballad poetry, which finds its
highest level in Mr. Rossetti's Sister Helen, is also
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indebted to Mr. Scott for some fine samples. Saint
Margaret is a specimen of noble intensity in this
manner; and A Bridal Race is sprightly and deli-
cious. But the two finest of Mr. Scott's published
ballad poems are Woodstock Maze and Four Acts of
Saint Cuthbert. The brief history of the unfortu-
nate Rosamond is very freshly handled in the first-
named, in which simplicity and subtlety are admir-
ably blended : the playful joy of expectancy is grandly
contrasted at the close with the grimly tragic:
The golden evening burns right through
My dark chamber windows twain :
I listen, all round me is only a grave,
Yet listen I ever again.
Will he come? I pluck the flower-leaves off,
And at each, cry, yes, no, yes,
I blow the down from the dry hawkweed,
Once, twice, hah! it flies amiss!
O the shower and the sunshine every day
Pass and pass, be ye sad, be ye gay.
Hark! he comes! Yet his footstep sounds
As it sounded never before!
Perhaps he thinks to steal on me,
But I'll hide behind the door.
She ran, she stopped, stood still as stone-
It was Queen Eleanore,
And at once she felt what sudden death
The hungering she-wolf bore !
o the leaves, brown, yellow, and red, still fall
Fall and fall over churchyard and hall!'
The two closing couplets of these two stanzas are
used as alternating burdens throughout this poem,
and with excellent effect.
But excellent as are this poem and some others
WILLIAM BELL _
301
SCOTT.
of a like nature, it is in those pieces of a more purely
meditative order that the poet attains his greatest
aptness of expression. Never coldly meditative, he
is yet quite free from all unseemly disturbances that
arise, to the detriment of poetry, from any rankness
of passion; and he has the happy faculty of mixing
profound sympathy into his most thoughtful veins of
work. As a sample of weighty thought, supporting
what has been said of Mr. Scott's healthful effront-
ery in regard to Death, I can do no better than quote
a poem embodying a snatch of poetic philosophy
which it would be well for every man to get by
heart. The poem is that entitled Death, named
already; and I give it entire :
'I am the one whose thought
Is as the deed; I have no brother, and
No father: years
Have never seen my power begin. A chain
Doth bind all things to me. In my hand, man,
Infinite thinker,--panishes as doth
The worm that he creates, as doth the moth
That it creates, as doth the limb minute
That stirs upon that moth. My being is
Inborn with all things, and
With all things doth expand.
But fear me not; I am
The hoary dust, the shut ear, the profound,
The deep of night,
When Nature's universal heart doth cease
To beat; communicating nothing; dark
And tongueless, negative of all things. Yet
Fear me not, man; I am the blood that flows
Within thee, I am change; and it is I
Creates a joy within thee, when thou feel'st
Manhood and new untried superior powers
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OUR LIVING POETS.
Rising before thee: I it is can make
Old things give place
To thy free race.
All things are born for me.
His father and his mother,-get man hates
Me foolishly.
An easy spirit and a free lives on;
But he who fears the ice doth stumble. Walk
Straight onward peacefully,—I am a friend
Will pass thee graciously: but grudge and weep
And cark,—I'll be a cold chain round thy neck
Into the grave, each day a link drawn in,
Until thy face shall be upon the turf,
And the hair from thy crown
Be blown like thistle-down.'
There is a largeness here not often noticeable in
contemporary verse, and a form that is at once with-
out finish and beyond the need of finish: the abso-
lute scientific truth and philosophic insight of the
second verse is comparable with the higher flights of
Walt Whitman; and the summarised symbol - pic-
tures of death the enemy and death the friend in the
last verse seem to me to reach sublimity. But the
most remarkable thing about this poem is the general
likeness it has to Walt Whitman's poetry in mag-
nificence of thought and masterly freedom of form:
this is the more remarkable because the poem was
first published in 1835,—twenty years before Walt
Whitman issued his Leaves of Grass. It is a fact
worthy of record that the only poet among us who
has anything in common with the great American is
one whose works are best classed among the highly
cultivated results of the Preraphaelite movement.
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.
303
Whitman's return to nature' has been far more
decided and marked than any return that has ever
yet been made in art: he strikes up for a new
world' in the most absolute sense, ignoring all that
we have been in the habit of recognising as ap-
purtenances to the art of song; while the Prera-
phaelites, getting their best strength from move-
ments in the same direction, yet retain so much
of the hereditary artificial elements of European
poetry as are indispensable under our definitely Eu-
ropean conceptions of song. Even Mr. Scott, dis-
pensing with much that usually goes to make a lyric
beautiful, would not give up in this poem Death the
three little final rhymed couplets; and let it be fairly
confessed that he did well to keep them.
There is something of the same large freedom in
another beautiful early poem of Mr. Scott's,--Mary-
anne, a very sad poem tracing a village maiden's life
from the age of eight, through the gradual contami-
nation of city life to the terrible end, when, 'age un-
known,' we see her sliding grimly out of the world as
tenant of a hospital-pallet. Full of delicate transits
as is the narration, and relieved as it is by sweet lyric
notes at fitting times, there is something extremely
solemn and pathetic in the setting forth of the in-
evitable end:
L
A white-washed chamber wide and long,
With unscreened pallets placed in rows,
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Each tenanted by pain.
In the first a grey-haired woman, tho'
Still almost youthful : in the next
A girl with yellow teeth and eyes,
And lips as blue as heaven!
One form is there we have marked before,
Whose merriment we have heard. My God!
And yet perhaps 'tis her best bourne:
She shall not live to fight with dogs
For bones on the nightly causeway,
Or gather ashes thrifty wives
May fling from their hearthstones.
She may die! the board is sawn
And blackened, and the turf
Is soon rent up to lay her down:
While forms as fair, as gleesome hearts,
As blindly shall succeed her, -place
Their feet where she hath trod, -amid
Like laughter shut their eyes,—and then
Fill this her mattress, thus, with shaven crowns.
And fathers still will shake their heads ;
And youths who have not souls, have beards ;
And scribes and pharisees cross the way;
And country queans at harvest-home
Blush if they do not dance in silk;
And every lamp on every street
Light them like Maryanne.'
And one cannot too much admire the artistic cunning
with which this sombre catastrophe is developed from
the finely foreshadowed weakness of Maryanne's cha-
racter: in the first section (Age-Eight Years) we
see her going to church with her mother, as a simple,
impressible, little maiden, whose attention when she
gets to church is mainly occupied by an examination
of 'the laird.
There is one poem in Mr. Scott's collection,
written in the manner of the blank - verse nature-
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.
305
studies, but which is in some respects finer than any
of those even,—The Duke's Funeral. It is a piece
wherein many of the best qualities of modern poetry
are blended and concentrated in an extraordinary de-
gree; and I know no poem of like size and of the
present period that is more absolute in its excellence,
more complete and self-sufficient. than this. It gives
in a few lines what will no doubt be the verdict of
posterity on the character and doings of that brilliant
Duke of Wellington so long the most worshipped of
all the Penates of the British Philistine; appraises
his limited nature at its real value, to a hair; ap-
praises his noisy achievements also at their historic
value, and no jot more; and flings out into the most
burning significance that dire fact that the man whose
mission it had been to crush one Napoleon for the
restoration of Right Divine,' passed in pomp to his
tomb while another Napoleon stood triumphant over
Right Divine' prostrated again :
* Europe is saved again! France saved again!
A new Napoleon its last saviour, sweeps
These old things out like cobwebs, sabreing both
Legitimist and red republican.
So wags the world; so history fills her page!
And he who with this mighty pomp beneath
A nation's eyes goes tombward, leaves no mark !
As a poem dealing severely with a question of wide
contemporary interest this is unequalled in the large-
ness of its spirit. It is amply bitter for the occasion
--terrible in its severity—and the more so in that the
0
LUU
306
: OUR LIVING POETS.
S
artist shows that perfect strength of hand that alone
can keep poetry of this order from losing force through
excess of fury; and the sweeping breadth of vision
employed in drawing in just the right and sufficient
materials to fill out the well compacted fabric is note-
worthy in a high degree.
In all that Mr. Scott does, affecting the larger
questions of man's nature and destinies—and a great
proportion of his work does affect those larger ques-
tions-he shows himself a true and ardent soldier in
the cause of human progress and light and enfran-
chisement in all senses. The various notes struck
from his many-stringed lyre all hold as central in
their tones a clearly human cry, and even when depth
of thought leads the poet into obscurities, it is easy
to see that he is not in dreamland, but in a sphere of
clearly human meditation. Whether he be singing
in those large free cadences that we have seen in such
poems as Death and Maryanne, or submitting to
the straiter bondage (which is still ‘ perfect freedom")
of form more conventionally lyric, there is the same
liberty and depth of thought; and even in that most
artificial of forms, the sonnet, he does not lose his
enfranchisement, as we may see in the remarkable
Ten Sonnets embodying Religious Ideas. Some of
these are very lovely; and be it noted the 'religious
ideas' are always, as in other cases, embodied with
peculiar regard to their vital human aspect. Some of
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.
307
them are among the most perfect sonnets in the
English language,—as indeed are some of the mis-
cellaneous sonnets that precede them.
That Mr. Scott had not, up to the year 1868,
abandoned the exercise of this noblest of the pursuits
wherein he has achieved so much, he gave us a proof
in the poem Anthony published in the Fortnightly
Review.* That poem, exceedingly interesting in
itself, succeeds worthily to what has issued from the
same hand before, and serves to stimulate the wish
that we may ere long see the whole collection, in
some suitable form, put within reach of a public for
whom good poetry is a matter of yearly increasing
value and importance.
* For July 1868.
XII.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Something too much of Æsculapius in him, something too
little of Apollo his father.'--A. C. SWINBURNE.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
LOOKED at either as poet or as essayist Mr. Matthew
Arnold is perhaps more manifestly the vehicle of
ideas than any English writer of the day. Probably
no one feels quite as he does the great value of ideas
considered without reference to any possibilities of
reducing them to practice. To the essayist there is
far more advantage than disadvantage in this state of
things; because in an age and country with so strong
a tendency to gross utilitarianism as this country
and age show, a man who gives full force to the
cultivation and exposition of ideas holds a place of
marked superiority. But to the poet a too great
fondness for mere ideas is apt to bring a too great
readiness to accept forms of expression far worse than
the best, simply for the sake of some cherished ideas set
forth. And this cannot but result in frequent cold-
ness and lack of sympathy :-whereas the very life
and soul of poetry is that it should have been felt in
the artist's heart before coming to his intellect for
shaping and finishing.
Mr. Arnold's best essays are undoubted master-
pieces ; ånd yet in reading them it is not easy to get
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OUR LIVING OS
over the idea that one is conversing rather with an
intelligence than with a wide-hearted living man.
There is much retention of enthusiasm, and so great
a measure of delicate intellectual subtlety, that the
atmosphere is generally more or less uncongenial;
even while no sane person can fail to recognise in
every essay large gain to the realm of letters. But in
regard to the poems no general statement such as
this can be made; because, while some of the more
intellectual pieces seem to be outside the domain of
poetry proper, some of the more heart-felt and ima-
ginative poems are nearly as beautiful as they can
be.
Sharing with the Preraphaelite order of poets the
practice of Wordsworthian naturalism, Mr. Arnold
also shares with Wordsworth such repute as a poet
may get from dry sententiousness; while, in place of
the medievalism that lends so much beauty to Pre-
raphaelite poetry, he has taken to himself classic
stock, and has thus earned for much of his work a
high place in the Neo-Greek division of renaissance.
poetry. But to say that he is narrowly neo-classic
would be false ; for, while he has produced no poems
more replete with the higher elements of poetry than
many inspired by Greek themes and wrought more
or less after . Greek models, he has yet given us
some gems that are beautiful among the most beau-
tiful poetry of our day, and which have been caught
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
313
up by his imagination in searching the great store.
houses of Scandinavian and Asiatic myth and legend-
I must not let myself be tempted into making
here any lengthy study of Mr. Arnold's prose works;
nor is it easy to give in a few words a general descrip-
tion of them ; but I believe I may say with truth
and without offence that his essays constitute, more
than any English works of the day, a gospel of ideas
as opposed to the many gospels of practice. Indeed
he has been at so much pains to show the function
of criticism to be entirely an intellectual function,
that one must expect more thoughtfulness than sym-
pathy from him. His lucid and refined thoughts
on criticism itself are of the greatest value,-his
thoughts on all subjects he touches are of great
value, because they suggest in the most pointed man-
ner even when they convey no conviction of truth or
convey a strong conviction of error ; and yet I am
bold to say that this scornful assailant of British
· Philistinism' is nearly as much the slave of fine
ethereal ideas as the average Briton is the slave of
grossly practical ones. Note too that the predominant
ideas in Mr. Arnold's essays are often mistaken ones
to start with, and that, while he is working out his
theme with that perfect clearness and niceness of his
so good for all essayists to emulate, he is yet often,
in his own urbane way, doing very 'provincial' vio-
lence to the idea in hand by forcing it to include
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OUR LIVING POETS.
things that will not properly come within it. For
instance, he preaches the gospel of politeness to the
top of his bent: in his polemics he is exceedingly
polite, refined, urbane (to use his own pet word).
He condemns the brutal tone of our press invective,
but merely because it is not polite, refined, urbane,-
not because it wounds people's susceptibilities, and
he would accuse one of being vulgarly practical if one
asked what is the great matter whether an unkind
thing be said brutally or with the more refined devil-
ishness of urbane' sarcasm ? Perhaps the urbane
sarcasm hurts more than the brutal insult:-most
likely it does. Why then should we try to dis-
seminate urbane sarcasm at all? Does Mr. Arnold
really think he does humanity a good service when
he not only preaches, but practises also, urbane in-
vective? I can conceive that Mr. Wright, if he be
at all open to painful impressions from things said
of him in print, would not enjoy the implications
of a certain sentence of Mr. Arnold's in a certain
squabble about translating Homer. Noticing that
Mr. Wright dates from Mapperly, Mr. Arnold says
he should so much like to ask him whether he knows
what became of that poor girl Wragg—referring to a
girl who murdered her illegitimate child on Mapperly
Hills, and furnished Mr. Arnold with a fine illustra-
tion for some remarks made on another subject. Now
it is very likely that if Mr. Wright had had his choice
MATTHEW 315
1
ARNOLD.
-
he would much rather have been called a fool by the
Saturday Review than mentioned by Mr. Arnold in
the manner referred to above; and while Mr. Arnold
regards the Saturday Review as guilty of brutality in
calling some one a fool-calls that respectable jour-
nal a brute in point of fact-he is complacent enough
in the delivery of such urbanities as that just noted.
If he would advocate the abolition of literary squab-
bling, and set a new dignified fashion by dissemi-
nating his vigorous yet chaste ideas consistently,
calmly, without regarding or answering what he
might justly call coarse attacks, then one could find
no great fault with his manner, and the ideas might
be taken simply on their own merits. But when this
idea of urbanity is treated as having reference to style
alone, and is regarded as by no means incompetent
to include hard sayings, deliberately framed to hurt
people, then it seems to me that Mr. Arnold is carried
away by an idea-not calmly disseminating an idea.
For under the polished surface of Mr. Arnold's sar-
castic allusions and significant ironical humility it is
impossible not to discern rancour and egotism and
vanity such as are quite as foreign to the true spirit
of urbanity as is the tone he condemns in less polite
injures.
It is very easy in writing on urbanity versus pro-
vinciality to take up all kinds of faults, and stigmatise
them as provincial. But can any good reason be given
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OUR LIVING POETS.
for regarding the very grave offence of egotism as an
urbane rather than a provincial sin. Do we not get
the note of provinciality' here ?—'I have been taken
to task by the Daily Telegraph, coupled, by a strange
perversity of fate, with just that very one of the He-
brew prophets whose style I admire the least, and
called an elegant Jeremiah. Now, if it were really
important what the Daily Telegraph called Mr. Arnold,
and whether Mr. Arnold admired Jeremiah a little
more or a little less than other Hebrew prophets, this
would not be offensively egotistical. But those are
purely personal matters, and it is not reasonable to
expect that the Editor of the Daily Telegraph, or any
other editor, should discriminate nicely between those
Jewish prophets whose style is admired by Mr. Ar-
nold and those whose style is not; because, unless
it were introduced incidentally into some valuable
piece of criticism, the question whether Mr. Arnold
admires the style of Jeremiah more or less than that
of the other prophets is not really of much more im-
portance to the British public than it is to poor dear
Jeremiah himself. And it is no uncommon thing
for Mr. Arnold to bring in his own personality, as it
were by the head and shoulders, in this truly pro-
vincial manner. What has been said here has re-
ference exclusively to taste; but that the note of
provinciality' in matters of intelligence exists abund-
antly enough in Mr. Arnold’s writings has been pointed
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
317
out by one of his greatest admirers, Mr. Swinburne,
who seems to me to support his position well. *
But it is time to pass to the poetical works; and
first of all let us look at Merope, the largest of them.
The prefatory essay to this tragedy is itself one of
the best of Mr. Arnold's smaller essays, and gives a
very interesting account of the materials of the play,
and the treatments those materials have already un-
dergone. But here again one is detained to wonder
at the extreme affectation of this greatly intelligent
writer. The end of the essay, characteristic of Mr.
Arnold to a high degree, is quite a little masterpiece
of affected urbanity. It runs thus: 'How much do
I regret that the many poets of the present day who
possess that capacity which I have not, should not
have forestalled me in an endeavour far beyond my
powers ! . . . Only their silence could have embold-
ened to undertake it one with inadequate time, in-
adequate knowledge, and a talent, alas! still more
inadequate : one who brings to the task none of the
requisite qualifications of genius or learning: nothing
but a passion for the great Masters, and an effort to
study them without fancifulness.
What convinces one of the extreme affectation of
this is the obviousness of the two questions, why
publish the poem, and with a considerable prefatory
flourish of trumpets, if you do not think you have
* See Fortnightly Review, October 1867.
318
OUR LIVING POETS.
a capacity for that kind of work? And if you do,
why depreciate your tragedy? In fact, Merope is a
success on the whole, and needs no apology. The
subject is not as happy as that of Mr. Swinburne's
Atalanta ; but for intelligent use of the Greek form
in its larger outlines, Mr. Arnold's work is perfect.
The sentiment and characters too are wrought out
with a measure of unmistakably modern thought,
sufficient to give vivid life to a poem in a revived
form. Also the author has managed to present in
an intelligent and powerful manner much of the
supreme Caucasian subtlety that found its highest
expression among the Greeks. Perhaps the most
telling and genuine piece of poetry in the work is
that splendid tale told by Æpytus, when he comes to ,
kill the murderer-uncle, who has deprived him of
both father and inheritance. With what a Greek
perfection of self-reliance the youth accosts his dan-
gerous intended victim, and with what a grand pres-
ence of mind he gives glibly and graphically the ac-
count of his own death, which he invents in assum-
ing the character of chosen companion of his late self !
Look at this, the most important part of his speech,
relating to the hunt in which he pretends himself
killed :
* At last the cry drew to the water's edge-
And through the brushwood, to the pebbly strand,
Broke, black with sweat, the antler'd mountain stag,
And took the lake: two hounds alone pursued;
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
319
Then came the prince—he shouted and plung'd in.-
There is a chasm rifted in the base
Of that unfooted precipice, whose rock
Walls on one side the deep Stymphalian Lake :
There the lake-waters, which in ages gone
Wash'd, as the marks upon the hills still show,
All the Stymphalian plain, are now suck'd down.
A headland, with one aged plane-tree crown'd,
Parts from the cave-pierc'd cliff the shelving bay
Where first the chase plung'd in: the bay is smooth,
But round the headland's point a current sets,
Strong, black, tempestuous, to the cavern-mouth.
Stoutly, under the headland's lee, they swam:
But when they came abreast the point, the race
Caught them, as wind takes feathers, whirl'd them round
Struggling in vain to cross it, swept them on,
Stag, dogs, and hunter, to the yawning gulph.
All this, 0 King, not piecemeal, as to thee
Now told, but in one flashing instant pass'd:
While from the turf whereon I lay I sprang,
And took three strides, quarry and dogs were gone;
A moment more-I saw the prince turn round
Once in the black and arrowy race, and cast
One arm aloft for help; then sweep beneath
The low-brow'd cavern-arch, and disappear.'
One hardly knows whether to admire more the lively
and sympathetic intimacy shown with the features of
the scenery and the incidents of active life in the
open air, or the complete Odyssean mastery of him-
self, enabling the youth to tell this crafty tale with
so much earnestness and reality. It will be seen too
that this fragment, regarded with an eye for style,
merits eminently that refined title 'Attic' by which
this poet, as critic, sets so much store; and not only
the whole speech, but the whole work, is conspicuous
for its Attic purity of style, its perfect freedom from
aught that is heavy and gorgeous and involved. In-
320
2
OUR LIVING POETS.
deed one is almost led to overlook the very important
lack of lyric beauty in the play, for the sake of this
grateful Attic quality of style-grateful in so large a
measure to those who have suffered much from the
many cumbrous, interminable, gorgeously picturesque
similes which afflict the artistic sense in some of Mr.
Arnold's best poems, and which he might in some
cases defend as fitly Asiatic. But after all, how is it
possible to overlook in a Neo-Greek tragedy the ab-
sence of the true lyric note ? How, with all their
purity of language, can one pardon Mr. Arnold for
giving us no better choruses than those sung by
Messenian maidens in Merope? It is hard to believe
at all in unrhymed choruses being sufficiently mu-
sical for the requirements of a Neo-Greek play in
English ; and these choruses of Merope do not sing
in one's ears :- how should they, formed in this
fashion ?-
• Did I then waver
(0 woman's judgment !).
Misled by seeming
Success of crime ?
And ask, if sometimes
The Gods, perhaps, allow'd you,
O lawless daring of the strong,
O self-will recklessly indulg'd ?
Where would be the 'forlorn music of Atalanta if
Mr. Swinburne, who can make even a prose para-
graph sing, had written the choruses on the model of
this strophe instead of in his own superb manner ?
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
321
It must be admitted that some of the choric portions
have a rhythmic cadence entirely wanting in the
above; but none of them come up to the author's
beautiful 'fragment of chorus' of a Dejaneira, open-
ing-
O frivolous mind of man, .
Light ignorance, and hurrying, unsure thoughts,
Though man bewails you ngt,
How I bewail you! Helse
And even this is unmusical compared with the lovely
songs of Callicles in Empedocles on Etna. It is an
undoubted fact that Mr. Arnold can produce very
exquisite lyric work; and that he could find a sweet
lyric vein in treating the sombre subject of the death
of Empedocles, with a severity too that almost op-
presses us with its terrible fitness at times, is signi-
ficant of what he might have done in such a drama
as Merope. Who that has once read Empedocles can
forget the voice of Callicles, from below,' sending
up its divine calm music at that moment when the
goaded philosopher has forever assuaged his spirit
by a plunge into the crater ? After the fervid final
‘Receive me! Save me!' with what a grateful peace-
fulness comes the harp-player's
'Not here, 0 Apollo!
Are haunts meet for thee.
But, where Helicon breaks down
In cliff to the sea,'-
and it is not easy to find verse more satisfyingly mu-
sical, and at the same time more free from effort or
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OUR LIVING POETS.
redundancy of line, than those three verses near the
close,
"'Tis Apollo comes leading
His choir, the Nine.
-The leader is fairest,
But all are divine.
They are lost in the hollows !
They stream up again!
What seeks, on this mountain
The glorified train ?-
They bathe on this mountain,
In the spring by their road;
Then on to Olympus,
Their endless abode!
That this is not choric verse makes no difference
whatever in our grudge against the poet : if he can
make his Callicles sing such songs, he could make
his Messenian maidens intone their choruses just as
musically; and one must of course put down the
lack of choric propriety in Merope to the author's
besetting fault,—the letting himself become the slave
of an idea. It was not simply that he had certain
doctrinal ideas to embody in his choruses; but he
had fully taken in with his fine intelligence the large
beauty of Greek tragic form; and nothing would
satisfy him but to adopt the form with a preciseness
our language will not bear. And although these
choruses show by their want of spontaneity that they
have been bred intellectually, not felt, he yet shows
himself so far enslaved by his idea as to point out
their originality! How, without sacrificing the es-
>
7
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
323
sence of the Greek tragedy, a work of perfect music
could be produced, has been seen in Atalanta. The
great difference between that work and Merope seems
to be that whilo Mr. Arnold never let himself be car-
ried off by his subject into a single heart-felt mo-
ment's oblivion of the models his intelligence accepted,
Mr. Swinburne, having taken in no less fully and
carefully these same models, and having, it would
seem, felt more of the innermost meaning of them,
gave out his lovely drama with all the air of a natural
growth from his own soul and language ; and as the
most perfect music reached the Greek poet without
rhymes, so the most perfect music has reached tho
English poet with them,—as it always will. It may
be said that the younger poet is far more a slave to
passion and feeling than the elder is to ideas; but
that is not the present question: the important point
here is that what value Mr. Swinburne adds to his
Atalanta by the inestimable quality of spontaneity,
Mr. Arnold fails to add to his Merope, because his
artistic sense is so straitly controlled by a fastidious
intelligence; and the same lack of spontaneity shown
in the unmusical choruses of Merope avails to mar
more or less some of the most beautiful of his poems.
It is not always clear to what idea such and such
a seeming affectation is attributable; but that the
flaws of his poetry arise from the uncompromising
service of ideas no one who knows his prose can
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OUR LIVING POETS.
doubt. It is not very clear, for instance, why simile
is employed in these refined pages in what cannot
but be called a cumbrous manner. The figures are
usually excellent intrinsically,--always vividly pic-
turesque; but even in Balder Dead, which gives us
under the modest title of 'an episode' the most beau-
tiful of the Northern myths to be found in Snorri's
Edda, the strength of the Northern sentiment and
the frankness of the Northern atmosphere seem im-
paired by an over-laborious rhetoric. Surely a com-
parison, to be thoroughly effective, should be direct
and condensed; but with Mr. Arnold a long passage,
entering into all sorts of details of the objects used
for comparison, is frequently interpolated between
two portions of the thing predicated concerning the
actual subject of discourse. For instance, when the
god Hermod has to cross the bridge over Giall's
stream,' to beg his brother Balder back from hell,
the damsel keeping the bridge is introduced thus :
A
Scant space that Warder left for passers by;
But, as when cowherds in October drive
Their kine across a snowy mountain pass
To winter pasture on the southern side,
And on the ridge a waggon chokes the way
Wedg'd in the snow; then painfully the hinds
With goad and shouting urge their cattle past,
Plunging through deep untrodden banks of snow
To right and left, and warm steam fills the air-
So on the bridge that Damsel block'd the way,
And question'd Hermod as he came.'
The comparison of a damsel to a waggon is not spe-
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
325
cially poetical; and the details of drovers and cattle
are ineffective and irrelevant. There could be no
artistic object in setting a herd of oxen to stand as
the type of Hermod, the swift and nimble god of the
northern mythology; and, had there been, the de-
tails which swell up the eight lines of the simile
would not have been well placed. This simile of
cattle and drovers suggests a passage of the Lau-
reate's in Aylmer's Field, in which a good effect
is given by an analogous comparison. When the
miserable squire has been smitten by the sermon
preached at him, and is following his fainting wife
out of church, we are told in short direct phrase
that he
follow'd out
Tall and erect, but in the middle aisle
Reel'd, as a footsore ox in crowded ways
Stumbling across the market to his death,
Unpitied; for he groped as blind, and seem'd
Always about to fall, grasping the pews.'
There the simile is in proper subordination to the
incidents similised; and we do not for an instant
lose sight of the man, while holding in our minds
the touching association suggested in simile. But
in the other complex figure of speech we have to go
back and forward to satisfy ourselves who is to stand
for the waggon and who for the cattle, and to seek
inscrutable reasons for such and such small detail.
There are several instances of this in the same noble
poem of Balder Dead. Another example occurs in
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OUR LIVING POETS.
the passage where Hermod and Niord visit the cavern
of Thok, to beg her tears for Balder, the only condi-
tion of whose release from hell is that everything
weep for him : the simile here, though very beau-
tiful in itself, is spun out wearisomely. But for the
most extraordinary feat in hopelessly extended simile
we must seek in Sohrab and Rustum, the most
genuine and beautiful of Mr. Matthew Arnold's longer
poems. In it the treatment and materials seem
when looked at all together as well fitted to each
other as they are valuable individually. How clear
the poet makes the arid landscape of his piece, with
what a solicitous interest he keeps his readers hang-
ing on the event of the combat, with what a pathos
almost sublime he ends, all must well remember who
have once seen the poem. But when the bold and
courteous young Sohrab has fought with his father
unknowing and unknown, the mighty Rustum be-
ing the one champion the Persians can find to
match against Sohrab the champion of the Tartars-
when the youth, after a life of longing to meet his
great father Rustum, lies dying by that very father's
hand, the solemnity of the situation is surely not
heightened by the introduction of such a paragraph
as the following:
"As when some hunter in the spring bath found
A breeding eagle sitting on her nest,
Upon the craggy isle of a hill lake,
And pierc'd her with an arrow as she rose,
. MATTHEW ARNOLD.
327
And follow'd her to find her when she fell
Far off ;-anon her mate comes winging back
From hunting, and a great way off descries
His huddling young left sole; at that, he checks
His pinion, and with short uneasy sweeps
Circles above his eyry, with loud screams
Chiding his mate back to her nest; but she
Lies dying, with the arrow in her side,
In some far stony gorge out of his ken,
A heap of fluttering feathers : never more
Shall the lake glass her, flying over it;
Never the black and dripping precipices
Echo her stormy scream as she sails by :-
As that poor bird flies home, nor knows his loss,
So Rustum knew not his own loss, but stood
Over his dying son, and knew him not.'
CU TY
As a picture of bird-life this is all very pretty in-
deed, but between the situation of Rustum and
Sohrab and that of the two eagles there is no point
of analogy in the lengthy episode except that Rus-
tum and the male eagle are unaware of their respec-
tive misfortunes. Into what an insignificant arti-
ficiality does this shrink when we turn half a dozen
pages and witness the profoundly moving and solemn
spectacle of the mighty Rustum convicted of son-
slaughter by the mark on Sohrab's arm, and struck
into a frantic grief that at once reveals him to his
son, who has had a strong feeling towards his great
adversary all through the combat. “How say'st
thou ?' asks the youth,-
"Is that sign the proper sign
Of Rustum's son, or of some other man's ?"
He spoke: but Rustum gaz'd, and gaz'd, and stood
Speechless; and then he utter'd one sharp cry-
328
OUR LIVING POETS. .
O Boy-thy Father and his voice chok'd there.
And then a dark cloud pass'd before his eyes,
And his head swam, and he sank down to earth.
But Sohrab crawl'd to where he lay, and cast
His arms about his neck, and kiss'd his lips,
And with fond faltering fingers strok'd his cheeks,
Trying to call him back to life...'
It is refreshing to see Mr. Arnold lose for once,
as here, his imperious intellectuality, and give way
to an utterance supremely felt as this must have
been; and I know scarcely anything in modern poe-
try more intense than the anguish of the father and
the exquisite sonship of the youth. How beauti-
fully he consoles as far as may be the awestruck
champion, preventing his attempted suicide, and
sending him to await his fate, and how at length he
draws out his father's spear and lets his life ebb
from him, are matters told so as to form no anti-
climax to the central situation; and, happiest cir-
cumstance of all, there is a most solemn and appro-
priate close :
"So, on the bloody sand, Sohrab lay dead.
And the great Rustum drew his horseman's cloak
Down o'er his face, and sate by his dead son.
As those black granite pillars, once high-rear'd
By Jemshid in Persepolis, to bear
His house, now, mid their broken flights of steps,
Lie prone, enormous, down the mountain side
So in the sand lay Rustum by his son.
And night came down over the solemn waste,
And the two gazing hosts, and that sole pair,
And darken'd all; and a cold fog, with night,
Crept from the Oxus. Soon a hum arose,
As of a great assembly loos'd, and fires
Began to twinkle through the fog : for now
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
329
Both armies mov'd to camp, and took their meal:
The Persians took it on the open sands
Southward; the Tartars by the river marge :
And Rustum and his son were left alone.
But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there mov'd,
Rejoicing, though the hush'd Chorasmian waste,
Under the solitary moon : he flow'd
Right for the Polar Star, past Orgunjé,
Brimming, and bright, and large : then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles-
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain cradle in Pamere,
A foil'd circuitous wanderer :-till at last
The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bath'd stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.'
Note this time the perfect fitness of the brief simile
of the prostrate granite house-pillars, so appropriate
as types of the two fallen pillars of the house of
Rustum: note the impressive descent of night as the
proper garment for those who had fought so dis-
astrously; and note chiefly the symbolic final pic-
ture of the flowing Oxus-picture worthy of Turner
for its beauty as a landscape with a subtle spiritual
application to human life. The grand unconscious
flow of the river serves well its twofold purpose of
expressing the divine impartiality of the earth and
inanimate things in the presence of slain and slayer,
and imaging the shorn and parcell'd' life of the
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OUR LIVING POETS.
i
man whose great deeds have led him at last to kill
his only son : Rustum, too, a 'foil'd circuitous wan-
derer,' has his sole hope in the dark waters of that
sea into which the pale stars silently watch us all!
One favourite idea of Mr. Arnold's has not led
him into anything of verse-work that we can regret-
the idea, namely, that we are before all things bound
to watch for what is good in foreign thought and be
never weary of disseminating it. We have, from
him a considerable range of poems based on foreign
thoughts inasmuch as the situations are abroad, -
thus importing new elements into our literature;
and whatever we may hold concerning those excellent
essays wherein he advances so exaggerated an esti-
mate of Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin, whatever
we may think with him or against him as to the in-
fluence of academies on the world of letters, as to the
study of Celtic literature, and as to this, that, and the
other thing, we cannot but deem it an unmixed good
that he has gone abroad for such subjects as those of
Balder Dead, Sohrab and Rustum, and many others
which there is no need even to specify.
Of one ' foreign' poem I cannot deny myself the
gratification of a few closing words. The Church of
Brou, as far as the ballad narrative of the first sec-
tion is concerned, is not very remarkable; nor is the
second section, called The Church; but in the short
final section, The Tomb, the poet is seen at his very
YA
MATTHEW 331
TI
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/
1
ARNOLD.
best. I do not think I can recall anything as touch-
ingly beautiful in the way of verses connected with
the tomb of a hapless couple, -anything wherein a
warmth of colour at once so humanly sensuous and
so divinely ethereal is thrown upon the cold deathly
stillness of a marble monument. This is the con-
clusion of the poem :
"So sleep, for ever sleep, O Marble Pair!
Or, if ye wake, let it be then, when fair
On the cary'd Western Front a flood of light
Streams from the setting sun, and colours bright
Prophets, transfigur'd Saints, and Martyrs brave,
In the vast western window of the nave;
And on the pavement round the Tomb there glints
A chequer-work of glowing sapphire tints,
And amethyst, and ruby;--then unclose
Your eyelids on the stone where ye repose,
And from your broider'd pillows lift your heads,
And rise upon your cold white marble beds;
And looking down on the warm rosy tints
That chequer, at your feet, the illumin'd flints,
Say~ What is this ? we are in bliss---forgiven-
Behold the pavement of the courts of Heaven!”_
Or let it be on Autumn nights, when rain
Doth rustingly above your heads complain
On the smooth leaden roof, and on the walls
Shedding her pensive light at intervals
The Moon through the clere-story windows shines,
And the wind wails among the mountain pines.
Then, gazing up through the dim pillars high,
The foliag'd marble forest where ye lie,
“Hush”-ye will say~"it is eternity.
This is the glimmering verge of Heaven, and these
The columns of the Heavenly Palaces.”_
And in the sweeping of the wind your ear
The passage of the Angels' wings will hear,
And on the lichen-crusted leads above
The rustle of the eternal rain of Love.'
It was a fine thought to invoke the medieval knight
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OUR LIVING POETS.
and lady that lay in marble before the poet, and to
wring as it were from those two hushed mouths of
the chivalric age an exposition, so slight yet so per-
fect, of the connexion between the mysterious middle-
age architecture and those medieval ideas of heaven'
handed down even to these days -- between the ex-
quisite effects of evident nature and a supernaturalism
not quite so evident. There is a spiritual cosmopo-
litanism here thoroughly worthy of Mr. Arnold's
critical cosmopolitanism in regard to modern thought
in foreign countries.
XIII.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
Being tailed,
I'll lash out lion-fashion, and leare apes
To dock their stump and dress their haunches up.'
R. BROWNING.
Then he stood up, and trod to dust
Fear and desire, mistrust and trust,
And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet,
And bound for sandals on his feet
Knowledge and patience of what must
And what things may be, in the heat
And cold of years that rot and rust
And alter; and his spirit's meat
Was freedom, and his staff was wrought
Of strength, and his cloak woven of thought.'
A. C. SWINBURNE.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
SPEAKING of Southey, Mr. Swinburne says, in his
preface to Moxon's 'Miniature Byron,' 'A poet by
profession, he had assaulted with feeble fury another
poet, not on the fair and open charge of bad verses,
but under the impertinent and irrelevant plea that
his work was an affliction or an offence to religion
and morality. The issues involved in this remark
having been discussed in my introducton, only need
further discussion in so far as Mr. Swinburne's works
may be deemed an offence to religion and morality.
That two volumes of his have been so deemed is well
known; and that they have in the main been rightly
so deemed I am bound to record my opinion and
shew my reasons. At the same time it must be ad-
mitted that the poet has very good ground for com-
plaint against his assailants, for the manner and
virulence of their attacks, and that these same attacks
defeated in a great measure their own object. This
was disastrous, for, to quote Mr. Swinburne's words,
• The question at issue is wider than any between a
single writer and his critics :' it is not, however,
336
POETS.
TTTT
OUR LIVING whether or not the first and last requisite of art is
to give no offence; whether or not all that cannot be
lisped in the nursery or fingered in the schoolroom
is therefore to be cast out of the library; whether
or not the domestic circle is to be for all men and
writers the outer limit and extreme horizon of their
world of work."* No! the question is not this not
whether art shall adapt itself to the exigencies of in-
fancy and youth, but whether art shall have liberty
any more than life to be lawless, impious, immoral
-baneful to the normal adult-and yet go out into ,
the world without a word of protest or condemnation.
As soon as Chastelard and Poems and Ballads
were in the hands of the public, it was felt that the
new poet was offensive in his attitude; but I am not
aware that in any instance an attempt was made to
reason temperately upon the nature of his offences :
in point of fact these lay almost within the same
limits as those of his most violent critics, for both derive
equally from deficiency of true sympathy and toler-
ance. Mr. Swinburne could not (and still cannot)
tolerate creeds and codes without a place in his
heart; and his critics could not tolerate a rebellion
with which they of course had no sympathy. If the
poet's powers had been directed merely against dog-
mas and formulas, the matter at issue would not
have been much; but what he really " afflicted'in
* Notes on Poems and Reviews, p. 20.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNELLY
. 337
S
right-minded people was the abstract moral sense
and the true religious sentiment that rests at bottom
of humanity when stripped of creeds and codes. Thus
what the critics really felt was that Mr. Swinburne's
verse was frequently inhuman in its bearings, that it
tended to aggrandise with flawless workmanship bad
models of human nature, to exalt the worse passions
of man over the better, and to become such an irri-
tant to the base in man as would in many cases
excite people unwholesomely, and perhaps aid in
opening the gates for the full torrent of animal appe-
tites that are so tremendous in their fury when once
liberated. I am disposed to think that some of the
poet's defenders have altogether mistaken the grounds
on which the outcry was founded. There exists at
present a very strong party of right-thinking men
whose voices are in favour of a greater outspokenness
in literature ; they protest against what they call the
pruriency of prudery; and it has been thought that
Mr. Swinburne gave offence simply by being too
plain-spoken. Of course the answer to a charge of
indecency of speech is clear enough :—Shakespeare,
Dante, all the great poets held in universal esteem,
unflinchingly called a spade a spade;' and why
should not poets do so nowadays? We do not, it
may be argued, complain of Shakespeare when he
depicts the lower passions of man, however outspoken
he may be in his treatment of them, and why may
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OUR LIVING POETS.
not Mr. Swinburne have the same license ? But
that is wide of the mark. In a large art-work deal-
ing with human nature broadly, it were mere castra-
tion to soften down the worse passions and treat the
most infamous characters a whit less frankly than
the noble ones; and all the great names that can be
brought forward in support of the plea for plain
speech and real wickedness in art will be found to be
those who have treated human nature with a large
truth. We do not find these great men— these
Shakespeares and Dantes and Homers—picking out
some mean phase of passion or feeling and pouring
forth lyric effusions in the close groove of such pas-
sion or feeling : all that is most hideous in their
delineations of character and passion is justly dis-
tributed among the sane and noble elements of the
subject whatever it be. Now in the Poems and Bal-
lads we frequently find an essentially nasty train of
thought and passion tenderly set to a music that
shows, and to a certain extent elicits, sympathy with
such train of thought and passion : we find too that
this train is not mingled with the elements of a sane
humanity, but sought out and set in an order that it
does not exist in normally; and we miss altogether
those splendid antidotes to be found in every work
of Shakespeare or any other of the supreme artists
who have put foul things in their works because, as
an American writer has beautifully expressed it, 'God
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 339
puts them in his universe.' But whereas (to follow
up the theistic figure of speech) God does not put
them in his universe in such a measure as to tower
above and bold in abeyance what is clean and sane
and of good report, that is not art of the highest
which exalts the baser passions from their subordinate
sphere, and bestows on the inarticulate eloquence of
the jungle, the pigsty and the apery a splendour of
articulation reserved by high poets for high themes.
Whatever be the art in which a man works, he will
show more or less what his ideas of life are, or it
may be he will show that he has no particular ideas
at all on the subject, but merely an eye for isolated
facts and appearances. If this last be the case we
recognise no great merit in the man who selects
meaningless or nasty facts and appearances, and
dwells upon them as if they were the 'outer limit of
his world of work.'
Let us now look at Mr. Swinburne's works in
series; for whatever quarrel one may have with him
on the grounds above stated, his position in our
literature is of that importance that commands re-
spectful and careful examination for his works. His
earliest known book consists of two plays. The Queen-
Mother is of the usual five-act dimensions, on the
Elizabethan model; and the subject is good for
dramatic purposes, the scene being laid in the court
of Catherine de Medici and Charles IX., at the time
340
OUR LIVING POETS.
of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. The play shows
an acute critical understanding of the Elizabethan
drama, rather than an original dramatic faculty: Mr.
Swinburne has probably read in his time every play
produced in that great epoch; and his study seems
to have been sufficiently close and discriminative to
leave in his mind every element of construction em-
ployed by the Elizabethans. Consequently, when he
wrote his play, it was a close imitation of the school
in question-an imitation, too, in which many Eliza-
bethan faults are not only followed, but exaggerated.
Such a close and minute imitation cannot lead to
great results. Judged by modern criteria as to mi-
nutiæ of elaboration, the plays of even Shakespeare
are found faulty. The varying length and structure
of the iambic line employed by him and his school is
a fault in the eyes of modern critics; and the irre-
gular way in which the blank-verse dialogue of the
Elizabethan school is pieced, so as to leave jagged
fragments of iambic lines, and lines consisting of
more feet than the typical line is composed of, is a
thing to be regretted—not to be imitated. In some
of the dialogues of Shakespeare which are most re-
markable for vivid and rapid raillery there is a rugged-
ness of form which is anything but pleasing, if we
consider the make of the lines apart from the brilli-
ancy of the composition; and a ruggedness, too,
which was obviously permitted to himself by the
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 341
supreme dramatist as an economy of labour-not
put forward as a studied effect; but in The Queen-
Mother we get speeches from Cino Galli, the Floren-
tine fool of the Medici-woman, which are of a studied
ruggedness wonderful to contemplate as the work of a
modern poet. Such verse we can tolerate well enough
in works of that stage in the development of English
poetic art to which they belong; and it is but seldom
that the reader gives a thought to the make of the
verse in reading those great old plays; but now a
more regularly perfect form of verse has come into
use, and is looked for by the public. It is impossible
to ignore the dramatic intelligence displayed in the
outline of the play; but the imitation is so close, the
faults so many, and the style so little individual, as to
make the work unimportant.
The companion piece, Rosamond, displays the
same constructive ability in a less degree; and the
five scenes of which it is composed are well put to-
gether, if not interesting on the whole. There is
great pathos in the close, the death of Rosamond.
The last speech of Henry is forcible and thoughtful;
but it is not truly original in style, although the
latter part of it has a certain sharpness of diction
that we associate with this poet rather than any
other.
"Time was, I could not speak
But she would praise or chide me; now I talk
All this time out, mere baffled waste, to get
1
342
POETS.
TX
OUR LIVING That word of her I find not. Tell me, sweet,
Have I done wrong to thee ? spoken thee ill ?
Nay, for scorn hurts me, Rosamond; be wise,
As I am patient; do but bow your face-
By God she will not! Abide you but awhile
And we shall hear her; for she will not fail.
She will just turn her sweet head quietly
And kiss me peradventure; say no word,
And you shall see her; doubtless she will grow
Sorry to vex me; see now, here are two
She hath made weep, and God would punish her
For hardness, ay though she were thrice as fair,
He would not love her ; look, she would fain wake,
It makes her mouth move and her eyelids rise
To feel so near me.-Ay, no wiser yet?
Then will I leave you; maybe she will weep
To have her hands made empty of me; yea,
Lend me your hand to cover close her face,
That she may sleep well till we twain be gone;
Cover the mouth up; come each side of me.'
Though both these plays have a great stir of life
in them, Mr. Swinburne bas not revived the Eliza-
bethan drama as Mr. Horne and Sir Henry Taylor
have, by entering into the spirit of it thoroughly and
not trammelling themselves with minute imitation.
But in reviving the Greek drama the younger poet
has been as successful as the two elder have been in
the Elizabethan; and Atalanta in Calydon, the second
of his books, takes its rank among the great poems
of this century. It has been already noted (page 323)
that Mr. Swinburne seems to have seized the mean-
ing and tone of the great Greek drama more com-
pletely than Mr. Arnold has, while adopting it less
straitly; and it is now time to point out some of the
special beauties of this work. A good tragedy cast
ALGERNON CHARLES EL
SWINBURNE. 343
in this lyric-dramatic mould is nowadays a great feat.
Anything like a close analysis of Greek motives and
psychological characteristics must have an air of
affectation to a modern society so different from
Greek society in all its complexities of life and
thought: nor is it practicable to perform such an
analysis with great effect, because the artist, of what-
ever class, must study nature direct if he would ex-
cel, and modern society affords no possibilities for
the effectual study of a subject essentially Greek in
incident and spirit. Yet subjects abound in Greek
history and mythology which may be treated in mo-
dern verse with advantage; but then they are seized
as essentially human, not as essentially Greek, and
are treated from such a point of view as to be of in-
terest to all ages. In Mr. Tennyson's Ulysses, it is
not the traits distinctive of the Greek which go to
the heart of the modern Englishman, but the sense
of a struggling, energetic, undaunted hardihood of
human endeavour, as vital now as then. Our sym-
pathies are claimed by Ulysses the man, not Ulysses
the Greek. And so it is in Atalanta, so far as that
work depends on incident and sentiment. The story
of Atalanta in Calydon is a fine story; and it is most
fortunate that the poet has reproduced it here with-
out any such strong antiquity of flavour as would
have made it 'dry.' He has done but little violence
to Greek tradition and character; but what he has
344
OUR LIVING POETS.
chiefly reproduced is the splendid beauty of form ;
and it is impossible to admire unduly the perfect
manner in which the action works itself out without
any approach to tediousness, and yet without coming
near to the borders of that crowded pageantry of the
age of Elizabeth—so great in itself, and yet so poor
when attempted less than greatly. How exquisitely
the various exquisite bits of choric singing take up
and pass on the subject from scene to scene, and
how each piece of weighty melody expresses some-
thing grand and not extraneous to the matter in
hand, must be well known by this time. And it is
matter of congratulation that in this most important
of the poet's larger performances there is nothing
offensive in the manner in which some subsequent
works are offensive.
The hunt of the Calydonian boar does not of
course afford for artistic development that wealth of
chambering and wantonness to be found in such sub-
jects as that of Chastelard and in the multitude of
unhistoric nameless intrigues that have been since
the world began. The passion of vengeance, how-
ever, gets an appropriate development: in fact re-
venge is the chain of causation in the plot of Ata-
lanta. The boar is a curse sent by Artemis, because
that goddess is piqued at an omission of sacrifice to
her. Meleager slays the boar, and gives the spoils
to Atalanta. Meleager's uncles, wroth at this, and
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
345
jealous of the huntress, attempt to reverse their
nephew's act by force; and he turns upon them and
slays them. His mother Althæa, hearing of this,
forth with compasses her son's death, in tribute to
her. brother's memory. But this chain is not made
unpleasantly prominent. The capital point in Ata-
lanta is the great chorus dividing the action cen-
trally — coming after the appearance of dissension
between the huntress and Meleager's uncles and be-
fore the slaying of the boar with its disastrous accom-
paniments. And the terrible views of life set forth
in this chorus have a grand fitness of position. The
sentiments are, however, so completely in keeping,
with the negative, revolutionary spirit, characteristic
of Mr. Swinburne at that time, that the effusion
strikes as the spontaneous utterance of an eloquent
but misguided orator.
Magnificent as is the eloquence and exquisite as
is the workmanship of the chorus, it does not seem
quite sound from a technical point of view, because
after opening in due polytheistic order, it suddenly
makes a transition into monotheism, apparently for-
no other reason than the gratification of that anti-
theism which was the author's evident creed at the i
time. First, the gods are blamed in the name of
the chorus, and then words relating to God are
quoted: from the opening words, 'Who hath given
in speech,' to the end of the first ninety-two lines,
L
346
OUR LIVING POETS.
a bitter mood of polytheism is set forth ; and then
monotheism comes in :
'For now we know not of them; but one saith
The gods are gracious, praising God; and one,
When hast thou seen? or hast thou felt his breath
Touch, nor consume thine eyelids as the sun,
Nor fill thee to the lips with fiery death ?
None hath beheld him, none
Seen above other gods and shapes of things,
Swift without feet and flying without wings,
Intolerable, not clad with death or life,
Insatiable, not known of night or day,
The lord of love and loathing and of strife
Who gives a star and takes a sun away;
Who shapes the soul, and makes her a barren wife
To the earthly body and grievous growth of clay;
Who turns the large limbs to a little flame
And binds the great sea with a little sand ;
Who makes desire, and slays desire with shame;
Who shakes the heaven as ashes in his hand;
Who, seeing the light and shadow for the same,
Bids day waste night as fire devours & brand,
Smites without sword, and scourges without rod;
The supreme evil, God.'
After this we get that supreme utterance of what is
very far from wholesome-
* Yea, with thine hate, O God, thou hast covered us,'
with all the torrent of marvellous incrimination
which the world of letters knows so well. The point
of view here is purely negative—mere opposition to
à ruler of the universe conceived as existing; and
beside this it seems hardly artistic to make a Greek
polytheist quote, about God, words saturated with
an anti-theism of such late date that it could not
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 347
CUI
possibly have been quoted by the chorus in Ata-
lanta. The fault, however, is wilful, not careless,
and is doubtless bound up with the tremendous elo-
quence of the chorus.
Although this be the capital point in Atalanta,
I am disposed to think that a more perfect piece of
isolable work exists in that little second chorus-
LULU
Before the beginning of years’—
which holds in its small dimensions and under its
mellow music a piece of genuine sad paganism more
in keeping with the work than what we have just
been looking at. This blatant anti-theism is to be
regretted in such a work; and, while noting it, it is
necessary to note also the existence of a large share
of wisdom and sane pathos in the same poem. It
is not uncommon to meet in its pages such well-put
sapience as this:
•For not the difference of the several flesh
Being vile or noble or beautiful or base
Makes praiseworthy, but purer spirit and heart
Higher than these meaner mouths and limbs, that feed,
Rise, rest, and are and are not;'
and there is a profound beauty and sweetness
throughout in the attitude of Meleager to his mother,
from the time when she tearfully warns him against
the attractions of Atalanta to the last moments of
that life she sacrifices by her own act and deed. His
348
OUR LIVING POETS.
sonship, for all he cannot be dissuaded from his fate,
is perfect when he answers-
• Queen, my whole heart is molten with thy tears,
And my limbs yearn with pity of thee, and love
Compels with grief mine eyes and labouring breath :
For what thou art I know thee, and this thy breast
And thy fair eyes I worship, and am bound
Toward thee in spirit and love thee in all my soul.
For there is nothing terribler to men
Than the sweet face of mothers, and the might.'
And he is even more tender when, with wasting
breath, he absolves her and supplicates her to keep
him in mind after his death. But after all, whatever
be the moral and intellectual aspect of this poem,
the salient feature will always be its perfect suste-
nance of harmonious word-work throughout, and the
intensely elevated pitch of the choric portions.
The lapse of time between the issue of The Queen-
Mother and that of Atalanta sufficed Mr. Swinburne
for the formation of a distinctly individual style and
manner. This is the first requisite of expression
for a poet in these days of fine finish; and there is
no question that Mr. Swinburne has devoted much
labour to the elaboration of a potent poetic faculty.
In the pages of Poems and Ballads, whether prurient
or pure, there seem to be clearly enough marked the
footsteps of progression from the no-manner of The
Queen-Mother to the manner of Atalanta. Although
Poems and Ballads appeared after Atalanta, a large
portion of them are of earlier birth, as shown by the
LU
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 349
-
various degrees of executive ability, and as confessed
in the dedication-
For the youngest were born of boy's pastime,
The eldest are young.'
And from the first, when his style was not original,
Mr. Swinburue was never by any chance prosy, what-
ever his vices of sentiment and expression : even of
his prose the same is true; and the whole of his
works bear witness to the fact that the processes of
his mind are carried on in the poetic method, as
technically distinguished from the prose method.
• We have seen that Atalanta, with all its large-
ness, is more lyric than dramatic : we must now look
at Chastelard, on which no such remark would be
quite just. In that work, Mr. Swinburne has shown
that he is competent to apply dramatic principles
without close imitation, and indeed to produce a
greatly original play, at once finished and fit to act
if need bethough no need is likely to arise for
such subtle stage-work as this would be. There is
much cleverness of invention in the conception of
this historic subject; but, although it may be argued
that history is common property, and that an artist
may treat an historical topic from what point of view
he pleases, it will probably be conceded by most in-
telligent persons that there is a lack of artistic pro-
priety in painting the unhappy Queen of Scots as a
wanton, cruel, and unhesitating strumpet, without
10
350
POETS.
TAT
OUR LIVING in z
r09
compassion or compunction, without religion of heart
or soul, and caring for nothing but her own abomin-
able gratifications. But words are weak to describe
the terrible portrait Mr. Swinburne has drawn of the
Queen.
My readers of course know that the hero' is
the French nobleman notorious in history for his
criminal passion for the Queen, and executed after
being twice found secreted in her bed - chamber.
Now this material might of course be dramatically
treated without becoming prurient; but Mr. Swin-
burne, while freely idealising historical facts, has
worked his modifications in the direction of worse
than mere immorality. Over the libertine he throws
a glow of something approaching nobility, and thus
aggrandises a miserable animal passion. Over the
unfortunate Queen he casts a glare transforming
her admitted foibles to the likeness of all that is
most hideous in licentiousness, in deceit, in wanton
cruelty, in wilful, heartless tampering with passion.
The exquisite colouring of some passages in the
speeches of Chastelard is at times sufficient to dis-
arm the loathing with which one loathes the man's
motives on calm reflection. When hidden in the
Queen's chamber, awaiting her entry on the night
of her marriage with Darnley, Chastelard soliloquises
with a fervour worthy of a better cause; and when
the Queen comes in, and has sent Darnley away on
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 351
the plea of praying, there is a dialogue sufficiently
heart - stirring in its tenderness of expression to
throw in shade the abominable villany of the situa-
tion. After Chastelard has discovered himself, the
Queen, on this night of her marriage with another
man, detains the intruder thus:
Speak, if you will: yet if you will be gone,
Why, you shall go, because I hate you not.
You know that I might slay you with my lips,
With calling out? but I will hold my peace.'
And Chastelard replies :
"Yea, do some while. I had a thing to say;
I know not wholly what thing. O my street,
I am come here to take farerrell of love
That I hare served, and life that I hare lived
Made up of love, here in the sight of you
That all my life's time I loved more than God,
Who quits me thus with bitter death for it.
For you well know that I must shortly die,
My life being wound about you as it is,
Who love me not; yet do not hate me, sweet,
But tell me wherein I came short of love;
For doubtless I came short of a just love,
And fell in some fool's fault that angered you. ...
You answer not, but your lips curl in twain
And your face moves; there, I shall make you veep
And be a coward too; it were much best
I should be slain.'
But afterwards she does answer him,-
"I love you best of them.
Clasp me quite round till your lips cleave on mine,
False mine, that did you wrong.'
After much tender converse, she tries to persuade
352
OUR LIVING POETS.
him to save his life by escape; but he, determined
to die, remains to be taken. Immediately before his
execution, she visits him in prison; and very beauti-
ful are the phrases in which the two express their
'love' But all genuine charm must vanish if one
shuts the book and reflects that the object of Chaste-
lard's adoration, as here depicted, is a queen who
has, since he was incarcerated, used every sleight to
get him put out of the way, lest he publicly avow .
her complicity in his guilt. This woman, whose
parting with her paramour is made so redolent of
devotion, has attempted to persuade her brother to
dispatch him secretly in prison, has tried to get him
sent without further question from the country, has
signed his death-warrant, has issued a reprieve, and
finally, having come to beg her reprieve back lest
that shame her, and having found that he has de-
stroyed it out of consideration for her honour, she
gives herself up to his fondnesses, and tells him
that he, whom she is about to let be executed, is
dearer to her than all others !
The man acts his part of mad immoral devotion
under a full sense of the Queen's depravity, so that
all his lavished endearments, and a keen though one-
sided sense of honour, are ignominiously tacked on
to what is neither more nor less than a low sensual
appetite. The hideous incongruity of a man with
touches of nobility, devoted utterly to a passion for
(D
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE1
1
TYT
. 353
1
a woman whom he knows to be false and bad, and
towards whom converge what promptings of honour
and responsibility he has, regardless of all the rest
of this world and the next, is finished by a touch as
masterly in its incongruous wickedness as the rest;
for to crown all, he is made to die with a damning
lie on his lips, at the conclusion of a speech as re-
fined in its courtesy as could have been devised.
The misemployment of noble powers seems to me
to be at its worst in Chastelard rather than in Poems
and Ballads; because the dramà shows a settled and
determined will to carry out an essentially nasty con-
ception. There are technical faults in the work; but
they are as nothing compared with the great strength
of hand in moulding the subject in large, the extra-
ordinary acuteness in following out intricate trains
of emotion and thought, and the extreme delicacy
and beauty of expression if one examines the texture
of the verse.
In Poems and Ballads we get much the same
characteristics, but mingled with others. There are
a large number of poems of an unmarred and flaw-
less beauty for which we cannot be too grateful.
Every man of fine sensibilities can accompany the
poet with unmixed pleasure
"To the place of the slaying of Itylus,
The feast of Daulis, the Thracian sea,'
and listen while he translates into exquisite music of
AA
354
OUR LIVING POETS.
.
words that exquisite legend of Progne and Philomela.
We can all go with him to The Garden of Proserpine
and drink in thankfully the sad perfect strain he
pours forth there, or listen with rapt hearts to that
Leave-taking, wherein he calls upon his songs to
"sing all once more together,' ere they and he 'give
up, go down,' for lack of love from one they have
loved. Most of us can enjoy the wonder of wild
words shaped into that miracle of artificial form that
is indeed Rococo, and all but the few for whom Ma-
riolatry stands on the threshold can enter with the
poet into pagan Rome at the proclamation of chris-
tianity, and delight in The Hymn to Proserpine with
its passionate adoration for the pagan goddesses of
love and death, and its contempt for the meagre-
nesses of the new faith. But it is when we have to
follow into that region of fierce loves and light loves
where we meet with
Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores,
Fólise and Yolande and Juliette,'
that the healthy-minded right-hearted man finds his
delight in the poet's fine grasp and sharp keen music
and acuteness of vision altogether spoiled by the un-
healthy furnace-blasts of a meanly passionate atmo-
sphere. The average stomach will not stand such
things as the lingering talk of eating a woman, in
Anactoria,
ALGERNON CHARLES TT
LLL
SWINBURNE. 355
)
• That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat
Thy breasts as honey! that from face to feet
Thy body were abolished and consumed,
And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed!'
.
And still more hard to stomach are the details of that
leprous amour which The Leper discloses. When
we have closed the collection, and cast off somewhat
the sense of these more loathsome things, there re-
mains simply the impression of a mind in complete
abandonment—not merely loosed from the thraldom
of superstition and king-worship and priest-fear, but
from all ties, of whatever nature, that bind men
within the seemly bounds of decency and tolerance.
Enfranchisementis one thing abandonment another;
and the objection to these poems is simply that no
one who does not admire wickedness at least as
much as goodness, and think immorality as moral
as morality and filth as clean as cleanliness, can turn
from page to page without the fear of meeting some-
thing to offend even those who are not so very sus-
ceptible.
There was something of this unguided wildness
in the earlier poems of Mr. Swinburne's new era of
work—poems written since he laid aside, at all events
for a season, the glorification of unholy loves and
took to themes of wide interest. In A Song of Italy
and some occasional pieces of less importance there
is an evident lack of ballast and want of clearness as
to point of view; and in another very important divi-
356
POETS.
TZ
OUR LIVING sion of work, the prose essays intermediate between
Poems and Ballads and Songs before Sunrise, we may
note the same rashness of utterance. But what is
important in these essays is the extraordinary clear-
ness of critical view discernible if one strips off a.
little of the hyperbole of expression; and still more
noteworthy is the fact that Mr. Swinburne's enthu-
siasm has led him to maintain throughout a great
portion of every essay a distinctly poetic level and
afflatus. In fact these works, which with the excep-
tion of the book on Blake are merely pamphlets and
magazine-articles, should be collected and printed
together; and they would probably be found to em-
body as noteworthy a collection of Petites Poèmes eir
Prose as those of the late M. Baudelaire. These
words on Mr. Watts’s Clytie are instinct with many
of the attributes of poetry, and have but little of the
nature of prose : ‘Large, deep-bosomed, superb in
arm and shoulder, as should be the woman growing
from flesh into flower through a godlike agony, from
fairness of body to fulness of flower, large-leaved and
broad of blossom, splendid and sad-yearning with
all the life of her lips and breasts after the receding
light and the removing love—this is the Clytie in-
deed whom sculptors and poets have loved for her
love of the Sun their God. . . . We seem to see the
lessening sunset that she sees, and fear too soon to
watch that stately beauty slowly suffer change and
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
357.
die into flower, that solid sweetness of body sink
into petal and leaf.'
On Mr. Arnold's beautiful poem The Forsaken
Merman, he has written what seems to me a poem
almost as beautiful. He says that that of Mr. Arnold
‘Has in it the pathos of natural things, the tune of
the passion we fancy in the note of crying birds or
winds weeping, shrill and sweet and estranged from
us; the swift and winged wail of something lost
midway between man's life and the life of things
soulless, the wail overheard and caught up by the
fitful northern fancy, filling with glad and sad spirits
the untravelled ways of nature; the clear cry of a
creature astray in the world, wild and gentle and
mournful, heard in the sighing of weary waters be-
fore dawn under a low wind, in the rustle and whistle
and whisper of leaves or grasses, in the long light
breaths of twilight air heaving all the heather on
the hills, in the coming and going of the sorrowful
strong seas that bring delight and death, in the
tender touch and recoil of the ripple from the sand;
all the fanciful pitiful beauty of dreams and legends
born in grey windy lands, on shores and hill-sides
whose life is quiet and wild.' .
Among the most enjoyable of these productions
are the Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Flor-
ence (Fortnightly Review, July 1868); and there is
much that is valuable and interesting in the Notes
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OUR LIVING POETS.
Y9
ULL
LOT
112
on Shelley's Text (in the same review for May 1869).
But the poet's most extraordinary feat in prose is
his essay on his sometime master Mr. D. G. Ros-
setti--a piece which surpasses in sustained afflatus,
eloquence, and vivid beauty any poem in prose
that exists in the language. However, with Songs
before Sunrise still to look at, I must abstain
from any further remarks on the author's poems
in prose.
Erotic poetry must as a rule be peculiarly self-
l'egarding--poetry of a political or social tendency as
far the reverse as it is possible to any given poet to
render his effusions. Thus, while Poems and Bal-
lads is perhaps the most self-contemplative volume
of good verse the English-speaking world has seen
for some time—the most ruthless in bringing men's
worser passions before them through the contempla-
tion and reflection of a single self's lower nature-
Songs before Sunrise, devoted almost exclusively to
high thought and to the larger movements of na-
tions, is on the whole the most triumphant strain of
music, since Shelley's times, wherein one's peculiar
self-notes have been merged in the large harmonies
of humanitarian reflection. It was easy to conceive
that the intense nature of a poet who dwelt upon
certain sins with the stress and fervour of Mr. Swin-
burne-who regarded them as sins 'worth sinning
with all the whole soul's will-might, if differently
CUIU
ALGERNON CHARLES 12
WY
SWINBURNE. 359
1
directed, bring noble things to pass; and when Love
(so-called) gets superseded by Freedom, and the uni-
versal ideal Republic assumes the place and power
of Aphrodite over a passionate musical soul, it is not
surprising that the poetic result should have a great
value and a noble bearing. But if Poems and Bal-
lads wounded deeper sensibilities than those seated
in the shell of prudery our modern society wears,
Songs before Sunrise pierce similarly beyond the
mere external orthodoxy of the same society. In
proclaiming Freedom and the Republic the poet does
not assail the simple outworks of institutions that
are sanctioned by the natural conservative sluggish-
ness found even in the most progressive of peoples
-institutions not greatly dear even though left un-
touched : the Republic means with him democracy
in its extremest form; and Freedom means freedom
up to the last point of political, social, and religious
enfranchisement. Before the fury of such a freedom,
kings and gods, priests and superstitious creeds,
must, ere it fulfil itself, alike fall and be burnt u
in the light of its countenance. It is a freedom
active, fierce, defiant, destructive, just as his old
negative freedom was; but happily it has also its
constructive side. It does not strike at the root of
all theology for the sake of wounding what is person-
ally disagreeable to the poet, but because all theo-
logy is conceived by him as standing in the light of
- 360
OUR LIVING POETS.
man's soul and impeding the due service of human-
ity. The two most remarkable poems in this sensé,
Before a Crucifix and the Hymn of Man, have been
accused of wanton virulence ;' but, regarded with a
fair degree of intelligent sympathy, neither poem is
either wanton or virulent. Both are exceedingly
grand and full of fine feeling ; but it is only just
to admit that the present stage of modern thought
could have afforded a greater leniency than Mr. Swin-
burne has shown towards the ideas of God and of
Christ as God. There is a default of historic keen-
ness in regarding those ideas as merely noxious, and
ignoring the immense services they have done for
man. None the less, seeing these ideas but as stum-
bling-blocks in the path of mankind, and writing
with a fervid conviction, the poet cannot in fairness
be called "wanton,' however unrelenting the fierce-
ness of his assault. The poem Before a Crucifix
ought to be saved from misunderstanding by the
verses of tender yearning towards the humanity of
Christ, which verses should make it perfectly clear
that it is an idea, not a man or a god (in the poet's
mind at all events), against which the fulminant last
verses are hurled :
“Thou bad'st let children come to thee;
What children now but curses come?
What manhood in that God can be
Who sees their worship, and is dumb ?
No soul that lived, loved, wrought, and died,
Is this their carrion crucified.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 361
Nay, if their God and thou be one,
If thou and this thing be the same,
Thou shouldst not look upon the sun;
The sun grows haggard at thy name.
Come down, be done with, cease, give o'er ;
Hide thyself, strive not, be no more.'
119
D
Similarly, what was unwholesome anti-theism in
the great chorus of Atalanta has come with lapse of
years and growth of thought to be something posi-
tive and tangible in the Hymn of Man: to believe
in a God and to place oneself in an attitude of defi-
ance and hate towards him must always be con-
sidered undesirable for a poet, as for any other man
or woman; but to arrive at the firm conviction that
God is an idea-a figment of the human brain, pre-
served to the detriment of liberty and progress-is
neither blameworthy nor praiseworthy in a poet or
in another : it is a simple movement of his intellect,
over which he has no control. Nor can it be much
more than a matter of taste what measure of strong
language may be permitted to a poet in declaiming
against ideas he disbelieves with evident sincerity,
and in favour of ideas on which, with equal sincerity,
he looks as the only saviours of a very imperfect
society. When it is premised that
Thou and I and he are not gods made men for a span,
But God, if a God there be, is the substance of men which is man;'
ne
and when this idea is worked out with a l
thought and a magnificence of speech farthest from
362
OUR LIVING POETS.
levity, there can be no impropriety in such a natural
sequence of incrimination as that which ends with
* By the scourges of doubt and repentance that fell on the soul at
thy nod,
Thou art judged, O judge, and the sentence is gone forth against
thee, O God.
Thy slave that slept is awake; thy slave but slept for a span;
Yea, man thy slave shall unmake thee, who made thee lord over
man.'
Man, the slave of an idea, is simply shown in revolt
against such idea. Nor does the strong exultation
of the final lines pass into any lightness of mockery,
although to those who treasure theistic creeds it must
be exceedingly shocking:
• They cry out, thine elect, thine aspirants to heavenward, whose
faith is as flame;
O thou the Lord God of our tyrants, they call thee, their God, by
thy name.
By thy name that in hell-fire was written, and burned at the
point of thy sword,
Thou art smitten, thou God, thou art smitten; thy death is upon
thee, O Lord.
And the love-song of earth as thou diest resounds through the
wind of her wings-
Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things.'
Even if there be a merciless raillery in much of this
hymn, we can hardly deny to the modern poet a leni-
ency of judgment accorded to the prophet Elijah in
that precisely parallel situation from which some of
the very words of the Hymn of Man have come down;
for when Mr. Swinburne, the prophet of Freedom
and Nature and Man, cries against the worship of a
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 363
Jehovah whose existence he denies, he propounds.
the same grimperadventures' that were propounded
by the prophet of Jehovah, in crying against the wor-
shippers of Baal whose godhead he denied.
This poem is, in some respects beside that of
metre, the pendant to the Hymn to Proserpine ; but
while that sorrowful poem of superb beauty was
doubly negative and hopelessly sad in its meaning,
this one, if less exquisite in its cadences and har-
monies, balances negation with assertion, builds out
of triumph hope, and offers positive existences as
worship-worthy in the room of those ideas it seeks
to crush with scorn. The Hymn to Proserpine, ad-
mitting the fall of the pagan gods, prophesied the
fall of Christ's kingdom, -worked on the sombre
key - note (doubtless generally remembered for its
passionate sob of music),
• Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our tem-
poral breath;
For these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death,
and ended on the same note of woe—
• So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a
sleep.'
Whereas the Hymn of Man, with a philosophy nei-
ther hazardous nor flimsy, proclaims without com-
promise what things the poet finds worthy of honour
364
OUR LIVING POETS.
and worship in place of what he considers not only
obsolete but actively harmful.
It is not surprising that Mr. Swinburne should
have been accused of wantonness in these Songs, be-
cause there are things in his antecedents that would
certainly lend a colour to the charge, and notably
some sonnets which we may congratulate ourselves
on not finding included in the Songs before Sunrise.
I mean his Intercession for the Emperor, published
in the Fortnightly Review for November 1869. It is
perhaps in accord with general views concerning all
forms of republicanism, that any person professing
to entertain favourable feelings thereanent must of
necessity be sufficiently embruted for the perform-
ance of a savage war-dance around the very death-
bed of any professed opponent; and before Mr. Swin-
burne's recent proclamation it was well-known that,
when his muse led him to pass from the sickening
messalinism of his favourite subject-matter to glance
at political topics, he was enough revolutionary to
earn the epithet 'red-republican.' But probably no
one was prepared for anything as poisonously in-
human as those four sonnets concerning the failing
health of the Emperor Napoleon III. Under the
title of Intercession, and on the cleverly adapted text
"Ave Cæsar Imperator, moriturum te saluto,' Death
was besought to allow the Emperor a little further
space of life in order that he might see his dreams
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 365
of power fall away from him and die only when his
cup of misery might be full. Mr. Swinburne has
learned many things from M. Victor Hugo ; but it
was surely not from the man who wrote Napoléon
le Petit and Les Châtiments, while the Emperor was
strong in his perfidiously-gotten power, that any dis-
ciple could learn to yell hysterical invective and taunt
through the corridors of the Tuileries while the same
Emperor lay broken in body and laxly grasping the
sceptre. M. Victor Hugo, or any other legitimate re-
presentative of contemporary French republicanism,
would probably be the last to hiss into the ears of a
man deemed dying horrible whispers of comfort drawn
from such dying man's dire discomfort, of pleasure
taken at his protracted pain. The decadence of the
second Empire, built upon a foundation of broken
oaths and cemented with blood, may yield a fair text
or so for the calm moralising of some future his-
torian; and to see ill-gotten empery, however well
wielded, fall away may give as wholesome a satisfac-
tion to the sense of justice as on the blood-for-blood
principle the execution of, a murderer gives. But
no decent person goes to the scaffold to revel in the
murderer's agonies; and it is in the lowest degree
indecent to 'heap up words of personal insult and
brutal invective against a falling and dying potentate,
however justly falling. The crescendo of cruelty in
Mr. Swinburne's four sonnets, the paltering with
366
OUR LIVING POETS.
.
UL
human misery, the catlike clawing of the victim to
and fro, can only be realised by those who choose
to get the sonnets and read them; for no description
will give any idea of them. One would fain hope
that the absence of this grim Intercession from the
collection of Songs before Sunrise is evidence of a
humane scrupulousness in regard to the man fallen
from his high estate since the sonnets were printed.
It may be asked why they are brought forward in
connection with the Songs, and the answer is First
because they have a community of subject with the
book, secondly because they seem to mark an inter-
mediate stage between the nastinesses of Poems and
Ballads and the wide beauty of Songs before Sunrise,
and thirdly because they are perfect specimens of the
sonnet form, and cannot be taken back after having
once been given to the public. Being on a subject
of the greatest interest to all the civilised world, they
move in a better sphere than the sphere of low sexual
passion, and they yet retain the lowering element of
abandonment to an inhuman animalism--an animal-
ism of hate instead of an animalism of lust. There
is nothing like this in Songs. before Sunrise. The
most violent verses I recall are directed against im-
perialism--not against the Emperor:
With all its coils crushed, all its rings uncurled,
The one most poisonous worm that soiled the world
Is vrenched from off the throat of man, and hurled
Into deep hell from empire's helpless height.
LULUI
• ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 367
Time takes no more infection of it now;
Like a dead snake divided of the plough,
The rotten thing lies cut in twain; but thou,
Thy fires shall heal us of the serpent's bite.'
And it is a large gain to art that that degree of
violence which we may rest assured Mr. Swinburne
will ever retain should be directed into a channel
where it is serviceable, and against ideas instead of
against people.
There are some poems in the volume—the Hymi
of Man, for instance, and Hertha — which might
readily be supposed to be pantheistic in dogma; but
a little collation and analysis cannot fail in leading
to the conclusion that the poet who so marvellously
uses all the choicest elements of the vocabulary in
which we know Hebrew and Christian theology-
uses them too for purposes diametrically opposed to
their original purpose--has merely availed himself
of the alluringly beautiful phraseology and ideology
of advanced pantheism to array in a gorgeous garb
of symbolism a creed very far removed from the pan-
theistic. If Mr. Swinburne's creed be describable in
one word, that word must be made for the occasion
-pananthropism: man, with him, is not only the
master of things ;' but to his piercing mind-sight,
the freedom of nature's doings presents so exact an
analogy with the freedom that should be man's in all
his doings, that he sees the spirit of man (which
be it borne in mind he calls 'God') everywhere
1
368 .
OUR LIVING POETS.
animating and informing the universe. There is
not any trustworthy ground for seeing these at first
sight pantheistic symptoms as other than manifes-
tations of the masterly power this poet has always
shown of giving to things outward a human colour-
ing and a human cry such as is the making of the
highest poetry. He sees liberty latent everywhere,
and, as a poet, he speaks of that abstraction as a
woman: he sees that everything is dependent for its
value on the senses of man and man alone, and, as
a poet, he expresses that thought in terms that are
figurative. If he did otherwise, the abstractions and
ideas that are so grandly embodied and endowed
with form and voice in Songs before Sunrise would
be but abstractions and ideas, and not poetry at all.
The greatest portrait he has given us of Liberty
is in Mater Dolorosa : the conception of her as a
woman “fairer of face than the daughters of men,'
sitting by the wayside, in a rent stained raiment,
the robe of a cast-off bride,' is embodied in a manner
that is simply sublime; and a higher sublimity is
reached in Mater Triumphalis, when the poet sings
his rhapsody of self-devotion to the cause, and ad-
jures the dreadful mother' not to spare him. The
eloquence of these verses is hardly to be surpassed :
"I am the trumpet at thy lips, thy clarion
Full of thy cry, sonorous with thy breath;
The graves of souls born worms and creeds grown carrion
Thy blast of judgment fills with fires of death.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 369
Thou art the player whose organ-keys are thunders,
And I beneath thy foot the pedal prest;
Thou art the ray whereat the rent night sunders,
And I the cloudlet borne upon thy breast.
I shall burn up before thee, pass and perish,
As haze in sunrise on the red sea-line;
But thou from dawn to sun-setting shalt cherish
The thoughts that led and souls that lighted mine.
I am thy storm-thrush of the days that darken,
Thy petrel in the foam that bears thy bark
To port through night and tempest; if thou hearken,
My voice is in thy heaven before the lark.
My song is in the mist that hides thy morning,
My cry is up before the day for thee;
I have heard thee and beheld thee and give warning,
Before thy wheels divide the sky and sea.'
In a little song called The Oblation, simple in
its utter devotion, we get something of the same
idea differently stated : it is a song to Liberty again ;
it might be a love-song 01'he loveliest. Far from
simple in workmanship, it has an artificial form so
exquisitely done that nothing but spontaneity is ap-
parent; and the same may be said of Messidor, in
which a sort of fugued movement, with the fine
burden "Put in the sickles and reap,' is made to
tell nobly of the harvest of good things waiting the
sickle of the kingly people. It is impossible to
take up here each poem of this collection that is im-
portant, for there are but few that have not a certain
weight as portions of one gospel,--and that the most
vivid, urgent, and flaming of latter - day evangels.
71) U
VIVUT
ВВ
370
OUR LIVING POETS.
This evangel has not the perfect sanity and might
of hand found in the evangel of Walt Whitman; but
while that takes its lordly station in the foundations
of a new world, this must not be overlooked among
the greater attempts of poets to relume the splen-
dours of the old world so far as they are over-
shadowed by the oppressions men have to suffer
from men.
But though there be many Songs before Sunrise
for which I cannot spare the word I would gladly
give, there is yet a poem, properly belonging to them,
though not included in them, which I cannot omit to
mention, the Ode on the Proclamation of the French
Republic, September 4, 1870. As an ode, I think
this excels any ode of the present century. Pub-
lished separately before the Songs before Sunrise, it
was then the finest of the author's political poems.
It is more truly humane than anything he had pub-
lished, and it is saved from the proverbial dreari-
ness of odes by its fine neo-classicism of form and
its full-hearted eloquence. A Song of Italy, longer
and more ambitious, lacks form and perspicuity; but
this ode is clear in thought and splendid in form.
Instead of wanton talk of a nation 'glorious and
blood - red, fair with dust of battles and deaths of
kings,' it recognises pathetically the dreadfulness of
the crisis in which liberty again seized on the heart
of France. Avoiding personal attack and windy de-
ALGERNON CHARLES C
LITNY
. 371
SWINBURNEclamation, the poet set himself seriously to grasp
the great outlines of the most terrible situation the
world has seen these many years. He seems to have
yearned over this young republic and its forerunners
and accompaniments of national agony with an un-
looked-for tenderness; and his cry of intercession to
the human race is surpassingly lofty and admirably
broad. The opening of the epode, on nature's uni-
versal republic, is one of the noblest strains I know:
All the lights of the sweet heaven that sing together;
All the years of the green earth that bare man free;
Rays and lightnings of the fierce or tender weather,
Heights and lowlands, wastes and headlands of the sea,
Dawns and sunsets, hours that hold the world in tether,
Be our witnesses and seals of things to be.
Lo the mother, the Republic universal,
Hands that hold time fast, hands feeding men with might,
Lips that sing the song of the earth, that make rehearsal
Of all seasons, and the sway of day with night,
Eyes that see as from a mountain the dispersal,
The huge ruin of things evil, and the flight;
Large exulting limbs, and bosom godlike moulded
Where the man-child hangs, and womb wherein he lay;
Very life that could it die would leave the soul dead,
Face whereat all fears and forces flee away,
Breath that moves the world as winds a flower-bell folded,
Feet that trampling the gross darkness, beat out day.'
A word on the workmanship of Songs before Sun-
rise must be the last. We have learned to expect
from the author of Atalanta, Chastelard, and Poems
and Ballads perfection of craftsmanship up to the
full height of the poet's own ideal. Careful revision
is evident through all those works. Songs before
Sunrise are unequal in this respect. They show, as
372
. OUR LIVING POETS.
a rule, the same extraordinary intuition of perfect
work shown in the other volumes; but several of
them seem faulty for mere lack of revision. No one
who knows this poet's method can believe he deli-
berately prefers the halting cadence of the line
CT
With breasts palpitating and wings refurled'
to the cadence the line would have if palpitating'
preceded 'breasts;' no one can think he considers
despondencies' a rhyme to 'sea's' (p. 2), 'disbelief'
a rhyme to “leaf' (p. 1), “restoratives' to alterna-
tives,' or 'hours' to 'ours' (p.4), cadences' to 'sea's,'
'feet' to defeat' (pp. 6, 7); and these are taken at
random from one poem, the Prelude: there are plenty
of such defects elsewhere in the book; and the poet
would probably have seen them as defects if he had
noticed them, -as also such figurative incompati-
bilities as that overlooked on page 96, in the grand
image of the people crucified by king - craft and
priest-dom. In carrying out the crucificial idea of
an unenfranchised race, Mr. Swinburne actually works
through the taking down from the cross, wrapping
in grave-clothes, and deposition in a grave in the
blood-bought field,' asks
what man or what angel known
Shall roll back the sepulchral stone ?'
and then goes on to say—
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 373
• They have no tomb to dig, and hide;
Earth is not theirs, that they should sleep.
On all these tombless crucified
No lovers' eyes have time to weep.
So still, for all man's tears and creeds,
The sacred body hangs and bleeds.'
It is hard that the splendid pathos of such an ima-
gery should be marred, if ever so little, for lack of
care. Matters of dogma one may fairly leave to dog-
matic religionists for settlement among themselves;
but to point out such technical flaws as those named
above is the critic's bounden duty: he must not
shirk either this or the still less grateful task of
noting where the poet is deficient or excessive in the
weightier matters of sentiment and passion.
XIV.
WILLIAM MORRIS.
"The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of
the light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity
.... nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definite-
ness. To carry on the heave of impulse and pierce intellectual
depths and give all subjects their articulations are powers neither
common nor very uncommon. But to speak in literature with the
perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and
the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and
grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.'
WALT WHITMAN.
WILLIAM MORRIS.
THAT Mr. Morris's principal works are a revival of
the spirit of Chaucer's times and of the manner of
Chaucer's verse has already been indicated in my in-
troduction; and yet to say that his poetry is in any
strict sense reproductive of Chaucer would be as incor-
rect as to class him with Shakespeare or Browning.
The truth is that although the manner of his best-
known works is founded on that of Chaucer, and al-
though the medium through which he looks at things
is precisely analogous to that which lent largeness
and minute beauty to Chaucer's delineations, there
is yet an entire originality of language as well as of
idea, for which he is indebted, not to Chaucer or any
other, but to the wide resources of a unique mind.
There is not in Mr. Morris's books any passage which
can be called an imitation or plagiarism of his great
forerunner. The influence of the one mind on the
other is subtly felt, as the influence of Shelley is felt
in reading Browning's Sordello, only in a more palp-
able degree in proportion as the mental qualities
exhibited in the writings of Chaucer and Mr. Morris
are of a more palpable and less subtle order than
378
OUR LIVING POETS.
those shown in the works of Shelley and Browning.
The resemblance of Mr. Morris's poetry to that of
Chaucer consists partly in the choice of subjects, and
partly in the method of treating them. His subjects
are entirely classical or medieval, his method always
medieval.
Whether we read Chaucer or Mr. Morris, we get
much the same processional splendour of descriptive-
ness where multitudes and largeness of action are
concerned, the same minute yet significant delicacy
of detail where individual action is the artist's sub-
ject, the same comprehensive attention to situation
and surroundings, the same naïve implicitness of
belief where anything inconceivable to a modern
mind is to be told (as is constantly the case with
both poets). In this they are rivals, standing apart
from all others, that they show a full sympathy with
that stage of human development represented in
each tale; and this is compassed partly by a forth-
right statement of the facts as they are supposed to
have occurred, and partly by such an ingenuous and
inventorial minuteness of circumstance as disarms
all suspicion that the narrator questions the genuine-
ness of his tale. Now this is the most indispensable
quality to be sought for in simple tale-telling; and
without this the utmost agreeableness of diction and
the highest perfection of metre and rhythm are of
no avail. We must not forget that this Chaucerian
WILLIAM MORRIS.
379
class of poetry is altogether unmodern, so that unless
it reached in the hands of a contemporary artist such
a perfection as it might attain in the social medium
wherein it first grew up, it could not receive more
than a meagre recognition; and the cordial recep-
tion of Mr. Morris speaks volumes as to the quality
of his tale-singing.
It is natural that most of the characteristics of
contemporary poetic workmanship should be at a
minimum in these productions; and in the use of
metres and so on we find Mr. Morris entirely es-
tranged from his contemporaries. Instead of invent-
ing new metres, he has adopted three good homely
instruments used by Chaucer,—the seven-line stanza
of Troilus and Criseide, The Flower and the Leaf,
and other poems, the old-fashioned five-foot couplet
of The Knighte's Tale, used by Pope in translating
the Iliad, and the four-foot couplet of The Romaunt
of the Rose and The Book of the Duchess, afterwards
employed in the construction of Hudibras; and of
these three instruments he has availed himself with-
out that attention to minute construction shown in
modern metres, or in pre-existent metres under
modern treatment. We get here broad cadences of
music, an unfaltering flow of rhythm, easy perspi-
cuity of rhyme, fine large outlines of construction,
but not usually any minute delicacies or startling in-
tricacies; and this is precisely what should be the
CU
LI
1
380
OUR LIVING POETS.
case, for this reason: Mr. Morris's works treat largely
of action, incident, external form, colour, and so-on,
and he usually deals with only the simpler phases of
emotion. His subjects engage attention in regard
to the development of the story; and it would be an
interruption hardly desirable to have to pause over
minutiæ of manipulation when we want to follow out
the large effects of the artist. The adornments that
we want and get take the form of vivid and exquisite
pictures, resulting from force of imagination and
readiness of expression, and so clear and well-defined
as to need no study on the reader's part to take them
in. The interest is always sufficiently sustained by
wealth of imagination, unfaltering straightforwardness
of action, entire absence of anything like common-
place, and an adequate degree of force, sweetness, and
propriety of expression. Above all, the work is always
distinctly poetry--not prose draped in a transparent
veil of pseudo-poetry : to whatever length his works
may run we do not miss in them that condensation
without which verse can never be poetry.
In the ordinary books of reference, mythology and
folk-lore, especially Greek myth and romance, are
reduced to their lowest possible terms, and deprived
of all aroma; but in Mr. Morris's books we have the
added aroma of true poetic method and imagination,
to supply what is so delicately fugitive in the ordinary
process of distillation, as well as a rare discrimina-
WILLIAM MORRIS.
381
tive tact to eliminate such of the grosser elements of
the subject as are inessential, though retained in the
exaggerated prose nakedness of the books of reference.
These poems are such as no man need scruple to
take home to his wife and leave within reach of his
children; for if unimpregnated with modern doctrine,
they are at least innocent of what is gross in ancient
creeds. Of philosophy there is just enough to afford
the poet a point of view from which to treat his sub-
jects. Without a moderately palpable point of view
it is impossible to show great unity of intention; but
Mr. Morris's point of view, though sufficient for this
purpose, is as unmodern as his subjects and method.
In fact, whatever philosophy is expressed or implied
gives rise to no inconvenience in treating his chosen
subjects: from the hardy minds of the old world he
has adopted all that is kindly, humane, resignedly
brave, and a little of what is sad in the pathetic belief
in a short life soon to be forgotten ; but the evident
healthiness of a robust manly soul has saved him
from deforming his works by any fatal admixture of
that maudlin anti-theism which cannot but mar the
calm beauty of an antique ideal. There is no trace
here of unhealthy revolt against circumstance and
law; and although we may learn lessons to struggle
after altainable good and away from avoidable evil,
we are made to feel at the same time the beauty and
strength of manly submission to the inevitable, so
382
OUR LIVING POETS.
that if one calls the poet 'pagan,' it is but in the
negative sense of exhibiting no essential and dis-
tinctive modern principle, esthetic, ethic, or religious.
Some of the foregoing remarks apply almost
exclusively to The Life and Death of Jason and
to those twenty-five poems which make up The
Earthly Paradise; but before looking at those works
in detail it is necessary to glance at Mr. Morris's
early volume, The Defence of Guenevere and other
Poems. That volume has very striking affinities
with the poetry of more than one contemporary
writer. Mr. Rossetti's influence is the easiest to
discern; but there are also several attempts at psy-
chological art, clearly indicating Browning's in-
fluence; and while the book is altogether a very
charming one, this divided allegiance seems to have
had the effect of rendering the workmanship incon-
gruous and incomplete. Connected mainly with the
age of chivalry in subject, every page is full of an
exquisitely tender feeling; and in many instances
there is great splendour of imagination; but we do
not get, as a rule, that luxuriant fitness of method
to subject which Mr. Morris displayed nine years
later in his Jason. Several small poems are mas-
ter-pieces in their way; and every poem in the book
is full of beauties. But such pieces as Shame-
ful Death, The Judgment of God, and Old Love,
monologues dealing subtly with the soul, have
WILLIAM LU
383
MORRIS.
more real analogy with ballad poetry than with
monologue poetry of the modern type, and would
probably have been more perfect had they been
executed in ballad form. In The Judgment of God
in particular, the actual point of time whereat the
monologue is spoken is anything but clearly distin-
guished from points of past time referred to. It is
interesting to compare this piece with The Haystack
in the Floods, which is admirably graphic in narra-
tion, and as complete and excellent in its degree as
are some later higher flights of Mr. Morris. The
Judgment of God is spoken by an evil-hearted knight
about to engage in single combat with a good knight
who, as he fears, is to overcome him; the mental ma-
terial is the series of thoughts passing through the
false knight's mind immediately before engaging in
the combat; and so mistily are some of the verses
framed, that it is hard to know whether the facts
referred to in them have just taken place, or are
from the storehouse of old memories. The mono-
logue opens with the quoted words of the speaker's
father, giving instruction how to win the fight by
means of a sudden stratagem in the lists; and the
speaker's faint-heartedness is indicated in a manner
more objective than perspicuous, by the words “The
blue owls on my father's hood were a little dimm'd
as I turn'd away,'-apparently meaning that sick-
ness so far dimmed his own eyes that he could not
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OUR LIVING POETS.
see his father's badge plainly. Then he talks dimly
of the wrong done, the origin of his faint-hearted-
ness, and continues :
And all the wrong is gather'd now
Into the circle of these lists
Yea, howl out, butchers ! tell me how
His hands were cut off at the wrists;
And how Lord Roger bore his face
A league above his spear-point, high
Above the owls, to that strong place
Among the waters—yea, yea, cry:
" That a brave champion we have got!
Sir Oliver, the flower of all
The Hainault knights." The day being hot,
He sat beneath a broad white pall,
White linen over all his steel;
What a good knight he look'd! his sword
Laid thwart his knees; he liked to feel
Its steadfast edge clear as his word. ...'
Here is a complication: in the second of these
verses the speaker refers to Lord Roger as if he were
another person, while from the opening of the poem
we are to infer that Roger is the speaker himself;
then again the description of Sir Oliver, the knight
with whom he is to fight, has all the air of an old
reminiscence, although it is obvious that it must be
meant to refer to the time immediately preceding
that of the point of speech. With Mr. Morris this
want of perspicuity finds its preventive in direct
narration, as in The Haystack in the Floods. The
subject of that poem is not in itself so simple as the
other; but, instead of either of the principal actors
11
WILLIAM MORRIS.
385
being commissioned with the narrative, the whole is
given to us in Mr. Morris's own clear objective
style. We have perspicuously before us the Knight
Robert, with his troop of disaffected men, flying
with the Lady Jehane from Paris, where her chastity
has been impeached, and she has the dreadful alter-
native of undergoing trial by fire or water, or living
with a man (Godmar) whom she hates. With terrible
reality is depicted the wet, woeful, hasty ride to the
‘haystack in the floods,' where the fugitives are met
by Godmar and his men, outnumbered, and over-
powered. Godmar then gives Jehane an hour to
consider the alternative of living with him or return-
ing to Paris ; she dismounts, and in a state of
mental paralysis most graphically described, totters
to a heap of hay and sleeps her hour; and
' Being waked at last, sigh'd quietly,
And strangely childlike came, and said:
“I will not." Straightway Godmar's head,
As though it hung on strong wires, turn'd
Most sharply round, and his face burn'd.
For Robert—both his eyes were dry,
He could not weep, but gloomily
He seem'd to watch the rain ; yea, too,
His lips were firm; he tried once more
To touch her lips ; she reach'd out, sore
And vain desire so tortured them,
The poor grey lips, and now the hem
Of his sleeve brush'd them.
With a start
Up Godmar rose, thrust them apart;
From Robert's throat he loosed the bands
Of silk and mail ; with empty hands
co
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OUR LIVING POETS.
Held out, she stood and gazed, and say
The long bright blade without a flaw
Glide out from Godmar's sheath, his hand
In Robert's hair; she saw him bend
Back Robert's head; she saw him send
The thin steel down; the blow told well,
Right backward the knight Robert fell,
And moan'd as dogs do, being half dead,
Unwitting, as I deem: so then
Godmar turn'd grinning to his men,
Who ran, some five or six, and beat
His head to pieces at their feet.
Then Godmar turn'd again and said:
“So, Jehane, the first fitte is read!
Take note, my lady, that your way
Lies backward to the Chatelet !".
She shook her head and gazed awhile
At her cold hands with a rueful smile,
As though this thing had made her mad.
This was the parting that they had
Beside the haystack in the floods.'
The physiology and psychology in the sketch of
Jehane are alike excellent; and an admirable se-
quence is formed in hurrying her through physical
fatigue while under a strain of mental excitement,
bringing her suddenly under the dreaded influence
of the man she hates (an influence which, with the
extreme bodily discomfort of cold and wet, strikes
her into a collapse of mind bordering on paralysis),
cancelling her mind for one reactionary hour in a
dreamless sleep from which she wakes with the set-
tled determination not to be Godmar's, tearing from
her under horrible circumstances. her chief tie to
life, and leaving her to face unaided the frightful
WILLIAM MORRIS.
387
danger from which she was escaping with Robert.
Such a sequence as this would be likely to have but
one issue; and accordingly poor Jehane is left be-
fore us gazing childishly at her hands, the terrible
strain of body and mind having already set into the
devastating current of madness.
It is probable that, were Mr. Morris treating a
similar subject to this now, we should miss a certain
fierceness that exists in it as matters stand; and
equally probable it is that had the little drama of Sir
Peter. Harpdon's End * been conceived in these later
days of his poetic activity, we should have been
. spared the portrait of such an unmitigated beast as
the Lambert of that piece—for the later volumes show
a rare taste in eliminating all that is revolting in the
delightful region of old romance. Sir Peter Harp-
don's End is an excessively clever little play in five
scenes; but it falls as short of dramatic excellence
as the monologues fall short of technical excellence
in their kind.
In The Life and Death of Jason the poet has
caught the true spirit of the Greeks, so that except
for the evidence of language and method, the
reader might think he was reading the work of a
genuine Greek narrator-notwithstanding anachron-
isms found in the book, both in relation to special
facts and in matters of general custom. In this
* Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems, p. 67, et seq.
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OUR LIVING POETS.
almost entirely open-air poem, we follow Jason and
his companions about over the world with a full,
fresh, delicious sense of space and health and
beauty; and we never have to think of these men
as mean or low by reason of their creed or actions :
they are simply big-souled adventurers, not to be
daunted in their search for what the world yields of
great and desirable. Mr. Morris is never more at
home than when he is out of doors. He seems to
revel in nature ; and, full as his head must be of old
lore, it is difficult to imagine when and where he has
found time to acquire it, except by fits and starts in
open-air ramblings, for not an elemental trait escapes
him when he gets into his landscape vein. Far too
fresh are his leafy, woody, airy, sunny scenes to be
conceivably the result of a second-hand study; they
bear the impress of nature directly on them; and it
is nearly as impossible to conceive that they are
taken from other men's pictures as it would be to
believe that Turner's seas, skies, plains, and rivers,
were taken from anything but naked nature, or that
Michelangelo attained his anatomical splendour by
an abstruse study of the Quattrocentesti. The poet
who wrote the description of a storm in the first
book of Jason (pp. 13, 14) must have studied out in
the broad air, and deep in the woods, and down on
the river beds, with head unpropped by any student's
hand, and with leave to lounge open-eyed, open-
WILLIAM 12
389
MORRIS.
eared, drinking in the beauties of prospect and
sound fresh from the springs of nature. Even the
anachronism of shifting vanes on town spires has a
thoughtless naturalness in it which we should not
have got in a made-up picture, and insidiously
prompts one to suspect that this noble sketch of a
storm near the Greek sea, so many years agone,'
was never conceived a hundred miles away from 'the
rose-hung lanes of woody Kent.' A mere dashing
truthfulness in verbal landscape-painting, however,
would not serve for the treatment of a subject such
as the life and death of Jason : that is merely one of
the needful qualifications, and of the rest, the most
essential is that tender, guileless, slightly reflective,
almost pagan tone of mind rarely met with in inodern
times. This Mr. Morris has beyond everybody; and
without this his Jason would never have been the
creation it is.
To show in detail how the poet has kept the whole
of this old subject fresh, notwithstanding the great-
ness of his predecessors in treating it, would be out
of the question; but that he has done so is certain.
Whether we read of Phineus and the harpies or of
Hylas and the nymphs, of the flight of Phryxus and
Helle on the gold-fleeced ram, or of the passage of
the Symplegades—whether we linger with the poet
over Medea's visit to Circe or pass with him by the
shallows of the Syrensmall is fragrant, fresh, and in-
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OUR LIVING POETS.
stinct with originality as well.as pagan fidelity. And
in the greatest occasions the poet rises highest, thus
keeping well along the level of his subject. The two
capital situations are the taking of the fleece from the
dragon-guarded temple, and that defection of Jason
from his allegiance to Medea leading him into a
spoiled existence that only ends with his death.
Nearly half the materials are used in building the
story up to the point whereat, through Medea's help-
ful love, he obtains the fleece; and with the other
half the downward slope to his early death is symme-
trically constructed.
The conception of Medea is daring and powerful :
the austere sorceress of the popular idea is here sub-
dued to an exquisitely tender maiden with much
strength of character; and the latent fierceness of her
nature is shown in cunning touches throughout the
early parts of her story. The scene in the temple,
before the charming of the dragon, is very fine, and
in the following little speech there is great beauty
and significance : Think,' cries Medea,
How sweet a cup I have been used to drink,
And how I cast it to the ground for thee.
Upon the day thou weariest of me,
I wish that thou mayst somewhat think of this,
And 'twixt thy new-found kisses, and the bliss
Of something sweeter than thine old delight,
Remember thee a little of this night
Of marvels, and this starlit, silent place,
And these two lovers standing face to face.'
WILLIAM MORRIS.
391
Coming at the point where Jason's love and his
quest are about to be blended in one success, and
foreshadowing the downfall of his love, this is highly
artistic; and we get a taste of Medea's potential
fierceness when, on board Argo with the fleece, she
urges the adventurers to hasten the work of running
down the ship of her brother Absyrtus. This luck-
less prince falls by Jason's spear; and herein is one
of Mr. Morris's excellent modifications: bad Medea
reddened her hand with a brother's blood at this
point, as in the orthodox version, we must have lost
interest in her; but as the tale stands we are able to
regard her as a fair specimen of crafty antique woman-
hood, undeprived of the grace of sweet maidenliness.
Gratuitous ferocity is no part of this conception of
Medea, even when we pass from the Life to the Death
of Jason, wherein there is no essential change in
hero or heroine; and in this last division of the work
it is no small thing that is accomplished in so bring-
ing about the grim vengeance of Medea that the
reader cannot find in his heart much beside pity for
the injured Queen.
The germ of Jason's falseness to Medea lay in
that same restless spirit that sent him to Colchis
after the fleece: bold and headstrong, he could not
withstand the temptation which King Creon threw in
his way in the tender maiden Glauce, any more than,
ten years before, he had been able to withstand the
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OUR LIVING POETS.
temptation held up by King Pelias in the golden
fleece. The whole of the last book, depicting his fall
from allegiance to Medea, and his fading life after
her vengeance and departure, is magnificent. His
mere death immediately after his treachery would
scarcely have been affecting; but Mr. Morris restores
him to his healthy love of great emprise and to some-
thing of his old love for Medea, and thus renders his
premature death highly pathetic. Lying in the dark
shadow of his beached Argo, looking across the sea,
he broods on his inactivity since the loss of Glauce;
and bringing together the ruins of the past he begins
to build with them into the future, and to hope that
Medea, hearing of new exploits, may come and seek
him on his lonely throne. In this fine frame of
mind he lapses into sleep—his last sleep; for as he
lies the fated beam falls from Argo and crushes him
with his new aspirations.
The plan of The Earthly Paradise recalls that of
The Canterbury Tales; but the younger book is far
more symmetrical in form than the elder, and much
more finished in workmanship, as far as one can com-
pare on that head. The plan is this:- In the days
of Geoffery Chaucer certain gentlemen and mariners
of Norway, having considered all that they had heard
of the Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it, and after
many troubles and the lapse of many years came
old men to some Western land, of which they had
.WILLIAM MORRIS.
393
never before heard : there they died, when they had
dwelt there certain years, much honoured of the
strange people;' but before they die they join twice a
month in festivals appointed by the land's chief.
priest,' at each of which some tale is told. This ar-
rangement makes a certain limit to the length of the
tales absolutely necessary: Jason far exceeds the limit
of which tales so told could possibly be got through;
and it is lucky that the poet has not forced it into.
the larger book in a clipped form; for we cannot spare
any of it. In another great poem Mr. Morris has
gone far beyond his usual limits and yet included the
result in The Earthly Paradise-I mean The Lovers
of Gudrun; and in treating the subject of Bellero-
phon he has divided his tale into two, Bellerophon at
Argos and Bellerophon in Lycia. But there is one
poem in the collection which seems to have been a
little injured by constraint as to dimensions. The
Story of Cupid and Psyche carries us through a fairy-
land of fragrant myth, depicted with exquisite naïveté
and just that beautiful degree of minute objectivity,
which is not too minute. This fairy-land is occupied
by a thoroughly human-hearted little Psyche, of sweet
and tender beauty; and, as we follow her with eager
interest through the various trials and reverses she
has to undergo for love's sake, we cannot but feel
that we are working on and on to a noteworthy apo-
theosis. Tenderly and lingeringly as each detail of
394
OUR LIVING POETS.
her trials is dwelt upon, after her short bliss between
two stages of misery, we await a counterbalancing
minuteness in the setting forth of that great triumph
wherein Father Jove confers immortality upon her.
After we have seen her through the last hazardous
task imposed by the envious Venus, we are not pre-
pared for the immediate termination of the story; but
at that point it is already the longest of the first
twelve tales; and, although things would seem to be
tending to a further development, we have merely an
abstract of the Olympic proceedings which close the
history. This is unfortunate, because the story has
an admirable undercurrent of significance : the apo-
theosis of Psyche is the triumph of love; her trials
are the proverbial “rough course;' and the shorten-
ing down of the apotheosis gives this, the unfavour-
able side of love, too great a preponderance over the
triumph; so that we actually leave the tale with the
sense of discomfort in Psyche's sorrows only half
washed away—the impression of the sorrows conveyed
in the minutely objective manner being too strong to
leave the mind in the absence of an antidote of equal
minuteness and objectivity. When we look at the
faculty Mr. Morris has for finishing off everything,
the instinct he displays in leaving no jagged ends of
half-told story, we can hardly avoid the conclusion
that The Story of Cupid and Psyche was compressed
at the close on account of the mere exigencies of
WILLIAM 395
Ir
MORRIS.
plan. This finishing instinct is shown in many little
touches indicating unwillingness to lose any oppor-
tunity for a pleasurable detail. In Cupid and Psyche
it happens that the Phønix comes in on one occasion
as a part of the tale's machinery, to find Psyche lying
in a state of bewitchment; and, inasmuch as he does
a good thing, he has several lines devoted to the
winding up of his story:
And there she would have lain for evermore,
A marble image on the shadowy shore
In outward seeming, but within oppressed
With torments, knowing neither hope nor rest.
But as she lay the Phønix flew along
Going to Egypt, and knew all her wrong,
And pitied her, beholding her sweet face,
And flew to Love and told him of her case;
And Love, in guerdon of the tale he told,
Changed all the feathers of his neck to gold,
And he flew on to Egypt glad at heart. ...'
.
This is quite near the end of the poem ; and when
we find the very Phænix so tenderly dealt with, we
may justly feel a little chagrin at having to forego
any beautiful detail of Psyche's apotheosis—the tri-
umph of love.
In another of the Greek subjects, The Doom of
King Acrisius, we cannot too greatly admire the ease
and grace with which the whole subject, from the
girlhood of Danaë to the death of Perseus, is brought
into a poem rather less in length than Cupid and
Psyche. The poem shows great care and forethought
in the laying out; and in it we get a specimen of
LA
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OUR LIVING POETS.
what is by no means unimportant in Mr. Morris's
Greek tales,-his great delicacy in treating when ne-
cessary those amours of the gods, so coarsely and
barely set forth in orthodox prose accounts. In the
usual version of this tale, we are told that Danaë,
confined in a brazen tower by her father, on account
of a prediction that her offspring would slay him, ex-
cited the desire of Jove, by whom she had a son,
after the god had entered her chamber as a shower
of gold. Now Mr. Morris, without depriving the mi-
racle of an iota of its marvellousness, yet presents
the legend in a refined form, by bringing in the rape
of Danaë as a link in the chain of Fate, that essen-
tially pagan conception. Venus discovers the maiden
imprisoned, hastens to Jove to communicate the fact,
and concludes-
666 And great dishonour is it to us all
That ill upon a guiltless head should fall
To save a King from what we have decreed.
Now, therefore, tell me, shall his impious deed
Save him alive, while she that might have borne
Great kings and glorious heroes, lives forlorn
Of love's delight, in solitude and woe?”
Then said the Thunderer, “ Daughter, nowise so
Shall this be in the end; heed what shall fall,
And let none think that any brazen wall
Can let the Gods from doing what shall be." :
Such an arrangement of circumstances might or might
not have been adopted by an unscrupulous worker in
mythological material, but the pointed use made of it
by Mr. Morris has the effect of refining very greatly
TOVU
WILLIAM MORRIS.
397
(D
the love-scene between Jove and Danaë. When it
comes in the course of the tale's development, we
find it purified of all barbaric warmth,—a specimen
of Greek legend, retaining all its child-like freshness,
but overlaid with an exquisite delicacy new to its
fabric:
There on the sill she laid her slender hand,
And looking seaward, pensive did she stand,
And seemed as though she waited for the sun
To bring her news her misery was done;
At last he came and over the green sea
His golden road shone out right gloriously,
And into Danaë's face his glory came
And lit her softly waving hair like flame.
But in his light she held out both her hands,
As though he brought her from some far-off lands
Healing for all her great distress and woe.
But yellower now the sunbeams seemed to grow
Not whiter as their wont is, and she heard
A tinkling sound that made her, half afeard,
Draw back a little from the fresh green sea,
Then to a clang the noise rose suddenly,
And gently was she smitten on the breast,
And some bright thing within her palm did rest,
And trickled down her shoulder and her side,
And on her limbs a little did abide,
Or lay upon her feet a little while.
Then in her face increased the doubtful smile,
While o'er her eyes a drowsy film there came,
And in her cheeks a flush as if of shame,
And, looking round about, could she behold
The chamber scattered o'er with shining gold,
That grew, till ankle-deep she stood in it.
Then through her limbs a tremor did there flit
As through white water runs the summer wind,
And many a wild hope came into her mind,
But her knees bent and soft she sank down there,
And on the gold was spread her golden hair,
And like an ivory image still she lay,
Until the night again had hidden day.
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OUR LIVING POETS.
But when again she lifted up her head,
· She found herself laid soft within her bed,
While midmost of the room the taper shone,
And all her damsels from the place were gone,
And by her head a gold-robed man there stood,
At sight of whom the damsel's shamefast blood
Made all her face red to the golden hair,
And quick she covered up her bosom fair.
Then in a great voice said he, “Danaë,
Sweet child, be glad, and have no fear of me,
And have no shame, nor hide from thy new love
The breast that on this day has pillowed Jove. ..."
How exquisite is the touch of colour by which the
miracle receives its first introduction (the fault of
tone in the sunbeams), and with what delicate grada-
tions is the god developed from that first touch! And
at the end of the scene we get a couplet of the great-
est poetic suggestiveness — the concise, significant
statement of the objective miraculous fact which con-
firmed to Danaë the marvellous story just told to her
by the god :
Then forth he sprang and o'er the sea did fly
And loud it thundered from a cloudless sky.'
This is so admirable a climax to the episode that it
leaves the reader happy in regard to the state of Da-
naë's mind-assured that the godship of her guest
was sufficiently evident to her to turn her arid and
dreary brazen prison to a paradise of hope and present
joy in hope. Accordingly we meet with precisely the
aspect of things we are prepared for when, in opening
the next section of the story, the poet tells us that
WILLIAM MORRIS.
399
when her damsels came to her next day ... they
found her singing o'er a web of silk.'
A masterly power in introducing gods and god-
desses is one striking quality in these poems : the
instance just given is not an isolated one; but with
all the variety of circumstances there is an invariable
success for which an uniform good method is to
thank. Without any violence of apparition or un-
seemly suddenness of transformation, the supernatural
machinery is yet so arranged at all times that gods
appear and vanish in the most convenient manner.
The poet has in fact a way of melting these divinities,
as it were, into the fabric of his tales and out of it
again; and his method is entirely one of objectivity.
There are physical symptoms of approach and phy-
sical symptoms of recent presence in each case of a
divine visitation. It is so in the sample just given,
and it is again so at a later stage of the same tale
when Perseus meets Minerva. He walks on the
beach, while the western sky is still yellow with re-
cent sunset, and talks with an ancient woman'
whom he encounters, concerning the winning of the
Gorgon's head, which he has undertaken. This crone,
after hearing all his tale, is transformed under the
waxing moonlight, and Perseus recognises, in the
series of her newly-shown accoutrements, the attri-
butes of the mighty Pallas, who instructs him how to
proceed, and gives him arms for the quest : the
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OUR LIVING POETS.
reality of the apparition is attested by the shining of
the moon on these as they lie on the sand after the
goddess has gone. Another exquisite instance is in
Atalanta's Race, wherein Milanion wins the terrible.
fleet beauty by an appeal to Venus. In the plea of
Milanion we get also a beautiful instance of overlay-
ing of refined motive : he pours forth his soul to the
goddess, beseeching her to consider that he seeks the
hand of Atalanta for love alone, and not for riches
or kingdom-making no doubt that the failure of
those who have fallen in racing with her for her love
has arisen from dividedness of motive. Venus comes
to him propitiously; and this is the manner of her
coming :
Then he turned round; not for the sea-gull's cry
That wheeled above the temple in his flight,
Not for the fresh south wind that lovingly
Breathed on the new-born day and dying night,
But some strange hope 'twixt fear and great delight
Drew round his face, now flushed, now pale and wan,
And still constrained his eyes the sea to scan.
Now a faint light lit up the southern sky,
Not sun or moon, for all the world was grey,
But this a bright cloud seemed, that drew anigh,
Lighting the dull waves that beneath it lay
As toward the temple still it took its way,
And still grew greater, till Milanion
Saw nought for dazzling light that round him shone.
But as he staggered with his arms outspread,
Delicious unnamed odours breathed around,
For languid happiness he bowed his head,
And with wet eyes sank down upon the ground,
Nor wished for aught, nor any dream he found
To give him reason for that happiness,
Or make him ask more knowledge of his bliss.
WILLIAM MORRIS.
401
At last his eyes were cleared, and he could see
Through happy tears the goddess face to face
With that faint image of Divinity,
Whose well-wrought smile and dainty changeless grace
Until that morn so gladdened all the place;
Then he, unwitting cried aloud her name
And covered up his eyes for fear and shame.'
She then gives him the three apples, whose charmed
attractiveness is to divert Atalanta from the course
when the race is being run; and, after ending her
speech of instruction, she is melted out just as exqui-
sitely as she was melted in :
“Milanion raised his head at this last word
For now so soft and kind she seemed to be
No longer of her Godhead was he feared ;
Too late he looked, for nothing could he see
But the white image glimmering doubtfully
In the departing twilight cold and grey,
And those three apples on the steps that lay.'
But perhaps the most perfect example of manipula-
tion of godship is in The Love of Alcestis,—the exit
of Apollo after he has served King Admetus as shep-
herd for a year. The parting is at sunset, on a hill
where there is yet brilliant sunlight, though all the
eastern vale was grey and cold.' Arrived at the hill-
top, Apollo reveals himself to Admetus, and after
bending on him one godlike changed look,' takes
farewell of him, assuring him of future favour. “A
friend,' he says,
6. This year has won thee who shall never fail :
But now indeed, for nought will it avail
To say what I may have in store for thee,
Of gifts that men desire; let these things be,
DD
402
OUR LIVING POETS.
And live thy life, till death itself shall come,
And turn to nought the storehouse of thine home,
Then think of me; these feathered shafts behold,
That here have been the terror of the wold,
Take these, and count them still the best of all
Thy envied wealth, and when on thee shall fall
By any way the worst extremity,
Call upon me before thou com'st to die;
And lay these shafts with incense on a fire,
That thou may'st gain thine uttermost desire."
He ceased, but ere the golden tongue was still
An odorous mist had stolen up the hill,
And to Admetus first the god grew dim,
And then was but a lovely voice to him,
And then at last the sun had sunk to rest,
And a fresh wind blew lightly from the west
Over the hill-top, and no soul was there;
But the sad dying autumn field-flowers fair
Rustled dry leaves about the windy place,
Where even now had been the godlike face,
And in their midst the brass-bound quiver lay.'
The first instalment of The Earthly Paradise, at
some of the contents of which we have been looking,
has now been divided into two · Parts,' and in the
two remaining parts, issued later, there are certain
fresh characteristics. Although I have only men-
tioned specially some of the Greek tales in the earlier
half, the space is in fact divided between Greek and
medieval subjects. The medieval tales, told by the
• Wanderers,' include some of the most admirable
things in the collection, as, for instance, The Proud
King, and specially The Man born to be King. But it
is to be noted that these medieval tales are Germanic
in character. Between the issue of Parts I. and II.
and the issue of Part III. Mr. Morris was engaged
WILLIAM MORRIS.
403
in studying Icelandic literature, and while obtaining
from that source one or two subjects far more nearly
primeval than the medieval tales referred to above,
he also seems to have acquired a taste for a some-
what closer treatment of human motive,—though of
course it would be entirely foreign to the nature of
his fully-developed genius to go into minute intri-
cacies and obscurities. Some querulous critic was
grumbling at him awhile ago for wasting his time
over these sagas, whereof he has translated three,
those of Grettir the Strong, Gunnlaug the Worm-
tongue, and the Volsungs. Other men, it was said,
could translate those; whereas no other could finish
The Earthly Paradise. But in the first place,
taking for granted linguistic ability, of all men quali-
fied to render the old Norse tongue into English,
there is probably not one who could furnish so
thorough a rendering of the word and spirit of a saga;
and secondly, the inevitable communion of the poet's
soul with the souls of the sagamen of old has had a
valuable influence on the very Earthly Paradise sup-
posed to be harmfully kept in abeyance by the labours
of translation. Assuming that we are not so far gone
on the road to perfect civilisation, but that some of
us may yet find pleasure and profit in a fresh old
story or so of vivid adventure and real home-life, told
much as a sagaman might have told it, then the
translation of this sort of literature is a good work,
10
404
OUR LIVING POETS.
varying in excellence with the excellence of the re-
production only. And it is no great assumption
to assume more than this; for the years that are
piling our culture' about us are also widening the
conviction that precious is the soul of man to man,'
and so increasing the estimated value of works which
yield us clear notions of what life physical and intel-
lectual was among any our far-off predecessors, and
of what found favour in their sight as worthy matter
for poetry, or a prose form of presentation commen-
surate in its influences with poetry proper. A saga,
then, claims respect in its kind as importunately as
an Iliad or an Odyssey, an Imitation of Christ or a
Divine Comedy; and the translation of a saga most
to be desired is that which, besides possessing the
greatest essential faithfulness, smacks least of terms
suggesting modern thoughts. To secure essential
faithfulness, in so far as it can be secured by Ice-
landic scholarship, Mr. Morris wisely associated him-
self in his saga-labours with Mr. Magnússon; and
there is no second writer of refinement who writes
English as free from the barbarisms of civilisation as
the English wherein the history of Jason, and the
collected tales of The Earthly Paradise, are told by
Mr. Morris. The language of those poems has, as
an essential part of its beauty, a great primitiveness,
and a freshness coextensive with the young-world
freshness of the things narrated; and these are the
WILLIAM MORRIS.
405
qualities of mind and language which alone would
avail to make a modern English translation of a saga
anything like in nature to a work of art. Except for
a certain innate delicacy of refinement-a subtlety of
refinement imposed upon Mr. Morris by his descent
through many good ages, however much he may yearn
through those ages to the remoter past-except for an
easy unstrained avoidance of all the coarsenesses of
the younger world—Mr. Morris has, in his poetry,
so completely merged his modernness in sympathy
with the times he has depicted, that we have an ex-
cellent guarantee for his capacity to enter thoroughly
into the spirit of the times of Gunnlaug the Worm-
tongue and Grettir the Strong, and of the sagamen
who put the doings of those times on record, and re-
joiced to tell the tale of Sigurd Fafnir's-bane. Oppo-
site the title-page of his Grettis Saga, Mr. Morris has
inscribed a beautiful and noble-spirited sonnet--the
two quatrains expository of a sad-faced and tender pa-
ganism, and the terminal sestett embodying some-
what of the poet's inevitable modern refinement of
idea on the same subject :
A life scarce worth the living, & poor fame
Scarce worth the winning, in a wretched land,
Where fear and pain go upon either hand,
As toward the end men fare without an aim
Unto the dull grey dark from whence they came:
Let them alone, the unshadowed sheer rocks stand
Over the twilight graves of that poor band,
Who count so little in the great world's game!
406
OUR LIVING POETS.
Nay, with the dead I deal not; this man lives,
And that which carried him through good and ill,
Stern against fate while his voice echoed still
From lock to rock, now he lies silent, strives
With wasting time, and through its long lapse gives
Another friend to me, life's void to fill.'
But there is no need of such evidence as this to prove
the whole-hearted friendliness with which the for-
tunes of Grettir have been followed closely by the
poet, and put into his own tongue. An almost exu-
berant sympathy with the hero of the saga appears
and reappears in every chapter of the volume, in
some deftly-turned simplicity or vigorous piece of
narration of vigorous proceedings.
Many readers might perhaps find the story of
Grettir dry, on account of the entire absence of any-
thing that would nowadays be recognised as senti-
ment.' Grettir’s dealings with women are confined
to one incident which, though amusing, is neither
romantic nor edifying; and the only love-passages
that lend an interest to the book for such readers
are in the foreign matter introduced into the saga
in a late stage of its development,the loves of the
Lady Spes and Thorstein Dromund, the brother
and avenger of Grettir the Strong. These passages,
some of which are identical with passages in the
romance of Tristram, are a serious disturbance of
the saga's bleak bracing atmosphere; and certainly
the dextrous and delicate hand of one of the trans-
WILLIAM MORRIS.
407
0
lators might have eliminated the excrescent parts
with advantage to us and to the saga too.
He who is disposed to accept Mr. Morris's intro-
duction to saga-literature, and feels the lack of senti-
ment in Grettla, should turn for a different idea to
the beautiful little Saga of Gunnlaug the Worin-tongue
and Rafn the Skald-a piece pervaded by an exquisite
sentiment, with a far larger element of intellectual
life than the Story of Grettir has, and free from any
such blot as that just alluded to: if he be not then
bitten with a taste for these things, let him there rest
from his labour, for mere labour it will be. But if the
reverse be the case, a rich treat will be in store for him
in the noble Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, the
northern and parent form of the Niebelungen Lied.
Here he will find sentiment enough and romance
enough-flashes of a weird magnificence that all the
ice-hills of the Land of Ice have not been able to over-
reach with their long dusk shadows, and that all the
'cold grey sea' that rings the island of Thule has not
washed free of its colour and heat. The marvels of
this marvellous story are strongly upborne by the only
firm pillars art has ever had - those, namely, whose
bases are fixed in the utterly real, and whose capitals
reach the topmost heights of the imaginative and ideal.
The science of human souls shown in the general con-
ception of the book, and the particular conception of
each character, is perfect and deep and piercing—al-
408
OUR LIVING POETS.
e
beit those characters do not depart from the simplicity
of primitive people; and, although the presence of
the sexual element lacking in Grettir gives a certain
thrill of interest that that has not, yet the life depicted
in the two pieces is of the same primeval stamp; and
the ensemble of these pictures of our fathers as they
were serves to place vividly before us the fact that hu-
man passion is now much what it was then, for all
the lapse of centuries and growth of refinements.
Sigurd Fafnir's-bane (the Siegfried of the Niebe-
lungen Lied) is not the rough character that Grettir
is: he is not behind him in readiness to kill enemies,
and so on; but there is a certain courtliness about
him without the dishonesty of the court, and a come-
liness without the effeminacy of the polished pro-
duce of later times. Grettir is a brute, but a noble
brute; Sigurd is noble, but not a brute by a long
way; and yet I confess that the one fierce headstrong
savage of the Grettis Saga seems to me a greater con-
ception, artistically, than Sigurd or any other man of
Völsunga. As a work, however, this latter must carry
the palm from its more grisly rival, for the variety's
sake of its incidents and characters, and for the
strength's sake of the finer feelings treated in it
and ignored in the other. The one figure of the
warrior-woman Brynhild, so mere a woman for all her
king-slayings and war-deeds, is priceless; and the
working-out of the final crash -- full of passion and
WILLIAM MORRIS.
409
death and disaster-is a thing not often surpassed
in any literature.
It cannot be doubted that, though the reading
public may require time for the appreciation of these
works, appreciated they will ultimately be; for the
interest of them is too genuine, and the class of
labour bestowed on them by Mr. Morris too high, to
admit of any ultimate failure of recognition. The
Eddaic Songs translated and appended to the Völ-
sunga volume are very fine. Mr. Morris has doubt-
less done well to render these early poems in short
irregular unrhymed stanzas, if stanzas they are to be
called ; and he has, without loss of ease and simplicity,
given a good sprinkling of the alliterations which the
Icelandic poets used for the adornment of their verse.
His renderings of periphrastic expressions, too, have
a peculiar excellence; and, though this be the case,
the finest of all the poems is peculiarly free from such
expressions, probably by reason of the great earnest-
ness of that poem's depicted sorrow and the intense
reality and simplicity of the whole scene. This is a
poem inserted by the translators as chapter xxxi. of
the saga : it treats of the lamentation of Gudrun
[Sigurd's wife) over Sigurd dead, as it is told in the
ancient songs.' Some portions of it are very musical,
as for instance this that occurs twice-
• Naught gat Gudrun
Of wail or greeting,
So heavy was she
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OUR LIVING POETS.
For her dead husband,
So dreadful-hearted
For the King laid dead there."
And there is an exquisite feeling in the two stanzas
following that wherein it is told that Gullrond 'swept
the sheet away from Sigurd, and turned his cheek
toward his wife's knees,' in order to get greeting'
for her after other means had failed :
Once looked Gudrun-
One look only,
And saw her lord's locks
Lying all bloody,
The great man's eyes
Glazed and deadly,
And his heart's bulwark
Broken by sword-edge.
Back then sank Gudrun,
Back on the bolster,
Loosed was her head array,
Red did her cheeks grow,
And the rain-drops ran
Down over her knees.'
It is easy to tell up on one's fingers the thor-
oughly great translations of alien works into our
tongue; and this must continue to be the case, for
only now and then does an original contributor to a
noble literature care to give his time to the repro-
duction of any fragment of another literature ; and
only men capable of noble original artistic efforts
have, in completeness, the right vein of capacity for
passing a thing of beauty from an alien language
into their own. Among the few great translations
we have, these sagas will take their place.--ranking
WILLIAM MORRIS.
411
CO
doubtless, for perfection in their kind and for perma-
nence of interest, with Mr. Rossetti's Early Italian
Poets, with Mrs. Browning's Prometheus Bound,
and with some two or three translations of earlier
production.
The assimilation of saga-spirit into the fabric
of The Earthly Paradise cannot but be a gain to
a work owning as crowning virtues directness of
thought and narration, and freshness of out-door
atmosphere; and The Lover's of Gudrun, the chief
piece in Part III., shows how admirably the poet has
taken in the whole method of saga-telling, con-
densed it, overlaid it with certain beauties some-
thing above the saga standard of decoration, and
given it out again as an unmistakable section of the
Paradise, yet embodying somewhat of matter and
manner not found in former sections.
The general laying out of The Lovers of Gudrun,
a story taken from the Laxdæla Saga, corresponds
with the laying out of the sagas wherewith Mr.
Morris has enriched our literature by direct prose
translation. It opens by introducing us to the two
families mainly concerned in the action, and princi-
pally to Kiartan the son of Olaf the Peacock, Bodli
the son of Thorleik and cousin of Kiartan, and Gud-
run the daughter of Oswif. Then, as in the Gunn-
laug Saga, a dream is introduced (Gudrun's, this
one) and prophetically interpreted. The interpreter,
412
OUR LIVING POETS.
1
Guest the Wise, then prophesies concerning Kiartan
and Bodli. Next Gudrun fulfils a portion of the first
prophecy by marrying a man whom she soon leaves
on account of his ill-treatment of her, and another
portion by taking a second husband, who is shortly
afterwards drowned. It is now that the important
part of the history begins: Kiartan, reputed to be
the noblest youth of Iceland, woos Gudrun, is be-
trothed to her, and, after much happiness in her
society, goes unmarried with Bodli to seek adventure
in Norway, where King Olaf Tryggvison is busy pro-
pagating Christianity at the sword's point. No sooner
are they leaving Iceland than Bodli finds to his des-
peration that he too loves Gudrun; but he harbours
at first no thought of trying to win her from Kiartan,
whom he regards as something more than a brother.
They are made welcome by King Olaf, and Kiartan
soon betakes himself to paying attention to Ingibiorg,
the king's sister, who becomes enamoured of him.
He finds her very charming, and seems to have for-
gotten Gudrun, the while poor Bodli's feelings are
more and more entangled by the memory of this Ice-
landic Helen; and at length Bodli goes back to Ice-
land, bearing a hot heart, and a message from Kiartan
sufficiently cool in tone. After a short fierce period
of irresolution, he makes Gudrun understand that
Kiartan is to wed Ingibiorg, and woos his cousin's
betrothed for himself. She accepts him, and shortly
U
WILLIAM MORRIS.
413
after their marriage Kiartan returns to fulfil his
pledge. Then it comes out that, for all his desire to
rove, and his seeming carelessness of his old love
while with Ingibiorg, he is in truth passionately at-
tached to Gudrun. His life is spoiled, cannot be re-
paired by his marriage with Refna, a second maid
who falls in love with him, and troublous times ensue
for allmending with the death of Kiartan by Bodli's
sword, and the slaying of Bodli by Kiartan's family.
Thus is another part of Guest's forecast accomplished;
and for the rest, Gudrun, after long mourning, mar-
ries a fourth husband, whom also she outlives to be-
come a blind and sad old woman, with an elderly son.
Such is the outline of the tale : saga literature
yielded Mr. Morris his material and the manner of
laying out, and introduced a fresh element of fresh-
ness into his book; but no saga afforded him the
tender refinement with which Gudrun, Ingibiorg, and
Refna are drawn, the largeness with which the fierce
and fond elements of Gudrun's character are brought
out, or the subtlety wherewith Bodli, the Agonistes
of the piece, is depicted in his severe nobility, dashed
with a single red streak of perfidy-in his complex
combination of strong purpose and weak yielding to
temptation. Bodli is the profoundest conception Mr.
Morris has given us; he is a man of an exceedingly
fine nature, of intense warmth in his affections, and,
when led to indulge his passion for Gudrun at the
414
OUR LIVING POETS.
expense of his friend, he bids good-bye for ever to
happiness, and knows he has done so-his very nobi-
lity of nature crushing his heart with remorse at the
one perfidy into which he has fallen. He honestly
believes that he loves Gudrun better than Kiartan
does; and even in that belief he can get no solace
from a marriage brought about by a betrayal of his
friend, though that friend looked very much like a
man who meant to betray his love. The utter un-
satisfaction of Bodli after he has put hope away from
Gudrun's heart is finely drawn : he cannot rest away
from her, and he is miserable with her.
1
So time wore,
And still he went to Bathstead more and more,
And whiles alone, and whiles in company,
With raging heart her sad face did he see,
And still the time he spent in hall and bower
Beside her did he call the evillest hour
Of all the day, the while it dured; but when
He was away, came hope's ghost back again
And fanned his miserable longing, till
He said within himself that naught was ill
Save that most hideous load of loneliness.
Hovso the time went, never rest did bless
His heart a moment.'
Marriage, however, appears to have been a matter of
course in those days; and Gudrun's obvious line of
conduct, on conviction that the noblest youth of Ice-
land was not, as supposed, at her disposal, was to
take the man at her feet, recognised as the next
noblest, and get what happiness she might from a
union based on a one-sided love. But not a suspicion
WILLIAM MORRIS.
415
of joy to either man or woman arises from the part-
nership contracted under these sombre conditions.
A dismal wedding !' says the poet-
10
I
'Every ear at strain
Some sign of things that were to be to gain ;
A guard on every tongue lest some old name
Should set the poisoned smouldering pile aflame. ...
But if 'neath all folk's eyes things went e'en so,
How would it be then with the bapless two
The morrow of that feast? This I know well,
That upon Bodli the last gate of hell
Seemed shut at last, and no more like a star
Far off perchance, yet bright however far,
Shone hope of better days; yet he lived on,
And soon indeed, the worst of all being won,
And gleams of frantic pleasure therewithal,
A certain quiet on his soul did fall,
As though he saw the end and waited it.
But over Gudrun changes wild would flit,
And sometimes stony would she seem to be;
And sometimes would she give short ecstasy
To Bodli with a fit of seeming love;
And sometimes, as repenting sore thereof,
Silent the live-long day would sit and stare,
As though she knew some ghost were drawing near,
And ere it.came with all the world must break,
That she might lose no word it chanced to speak.'
And so matters go hideously on, until Kiartan's
coming back and marrying Refna drive Gudrun fran-
tic with sorrow at having missed the man who has
really loved her, and whom she most loves, rage with
the husband through whose agency the miscarriage
of her happiness has chanced, and jealousy of the
woman who has apparently inherited the affection
once for her alone. Under Mr. Morris's treatment it
416
OUR LIVING POETS.
is of course through no coarse and brutal enmity be-
tween his dioscuri that the catastrophe comes about,
but through the fervid torrent of Gudrun's love being
diverted into a channel of temporary hate, and fed
and irritated by the 'fierce dull sons of Oswif,' ever
jealous of Kiartan, Bodli, and the rest of Olaf's
household. The soul which the poet has put in Bodli
is far superior to the wreaking of animal hatred on
his betrayed friend; and Kiartan, though a much
simpler study in psychology, is no less noble than
Bodli, so no more capable of low hate. Kiartan’s is
one of those large and liberal natures occasionally
seen blended with such great personal attractiveness,
that every one, man or woman, is more or less sub-
ject to the easy, princely, unassuming ascendency of
the person so endowed. These rare souls, being
courted and made much of wherever they go, have no
need to take life otherwise than easily; and it remains
an open question to bystanders how much sterling
nobility such natures really hold, until some dire
dilemma brings out the truth at bottom of the soul.
Kiartan, a man fitted eminently for a large simple
life of success, might never have shown greatness or
smallness but for Bodli's perfidy; and when these
two fine fellows are thrown into collision on the swirl
of the current of Gudrun's fierce love, that would fain
consume the thing loved for very hell of jealousy,
each desires only to fall by the other's sword-Bodli
WILLIAM MORRIS.
417
advancing his blade to meet the parry and retort of
Kiartan, and Kiartan throwing down his arms unex-
pectedly to take in his breast the sword of Bodli, long
since cursed as the bane of Olaf the Peacock's stock.
The culminating refinement of the poet upon saga
barbarism comes in the magnificent pathos of Bodli's
speech over his dead rival.
In Part IV. of this great work we still find Mr.
Morris's delicacy and good sense powerful to keep him
away from all doubtful subjects; and the complete
mastery the years of his labour have given him over
romantic method, as well as over the instruments he
has selected for use, and the noble Saxon-English
that he writes as fluently as if our language contained
no composite barbarisms, suffice to render everything
he does more or less a master-piece. Still, for mas-
ter-pieces in the extreme sense of the word, one would
go to Part III. rather than to either of the other
Parts, for in neither division is there any one poem
that approaches The Lovers of Gudrun in point of
breadth, depth, and grandeur, or any one poem com-
parable with The Land East of the Sun and West of
the Moon in point of exquisite sustained imagination
and what may be called the Shelleyan singing faculty.
I must guard myself carefully against misunderstand-
ing: of each and all of these poems I think highly;
but The Lover's of Gudrun has no equal in Chaucer,
and is therefore unrivalled as a poetic romance ;
EE
28
VIULU
418
LY
TITTY
OUR LIVING POETS.
U
whilst, as regards the word Shelleyan, I simply use it
because I conceive Shelley to be the typical singer of
the English tongue—the man whose utterances are
most completely and musically dissevered from prose
—and not because there is any faintest likeness be-
tween the ultra-liberal modern mystic and the un-
modern reveller in the halls of ancient and medieval
l'omance.
The chief thing to note in the fourth Part is the
introduction of two tales representing that period
when pagan creeds were so blended with men's chris-
tianity as to give countenance to legends wherein the
pagan deities bore an actual part in the transactions.
The Ring given to Venus is founded on a tradition
which William of Malmesbury tells, with all the sim-
plicity of medieval credulity, as an authentic narrative
concerning a young nobleman of Rome. But while
the two pages that the legend occupies in the chro-
nicler's volume* reek of that region described by
Canon Kingsley as Old-wives’-fabledom, the poem
built by Mr. Morris on that so slender material has
no smack whatever of the ridiculous, and is, indeed,
one of the most remarkable of his productions in some
respects. One or two grossly offensive features, pre-
served by William of Malmesbury, Mr. Morris has
rejected, filling in with material of his own far fitter
for the purposes of a tale illustrating so curious a
* Bohn's Antiquarian Library.
(D
WILLIAM MORRIS.
419
phase of belief as this one does,—the idea of the con-
tinued existence of the gods of Greece and Rome
under degraded circumstances. The men who set
afloat this story, christian men though they must
have been, at least in profession, appear to have re-
garded the pagan deities as the living though van-
quished enemies of God, and to have had faith in the
possibility of these enthralled rulers of the antique
world achieving, with the assistance of wicked necro-
mancy, somewhat to assert their old power. Here
we have a narrative of a newly-married youth placing
his spousal ring on the finger of a bronze statue of
Venus, which bronze statue closes its finger on the
ring, and afterwards causes it to disappear altogether;
and it is only through the agency of a magician priest
that the young man gets his ring back-not from the
statue, but from the very goddess! For, going by
night to a place indicated by the magician, he sees go
by in a wondrous pageant the gods of the old world,
and many companies of men and women long dead;
and finally he meets the master of the pageant, who,
on receipt of a letter from the priest, sends to Venus
and forces her to give back the ring. To those who
are disposed to blame Mr. Morris for the implicitness
of his apparent paganism, this is clearly a sufficient
amende ; for the master of the Gods of Olympus is
the Devil ; and this tale of the Olympians in their
transitional character of thralls and coadjutors of the
420
POETS..
11
OUR LIVING LA
King of Hell is told with just the same implicitness
of faith in the manner of narration as the poet has
brought to bear on any of the greatest feats of the
same deities done in their palmy days. A strange,
weird phase of faith, this; known to men as a phase
of faith long enough, * but embodied here with some-
thing very near akin to solemnity, as witness the
agonised utterance of Satan on seeing the well-known
seal of the magician, his master, permitted by God
for a season to exercise an unholy power over him :
Shall this endure for ever, Lord ?
Hast thou no care to keep thy word ?
And must such double men abide ?
Not mine, not mine, nor on thy side ?
For as thou cursest them, I curse :-
Make thy souls better Lord, or worse !'
The Hill of Venus, from the old German legend
of Tannhäuser, illustrates again this transitional
phase of faith ; but the original legend here seems
to depend more on a deduction of allegory from a
premiss of morality, and less on stupid credulity;
for the Venus of the Hill stands up as a superb pic-
ture of the 'lusts of the flesh,' arrayed in the utmost
beauty that a rank medieval fancy might invest them
with ; while the knight Walter, who stands in Mr.
Morris's poem in the stead of Tannhäuser, wanders
* Tom Moore did a poem on the same subject; and the late
M. Prosper Mérimée founded on the legend a tale of modern life
combining subtlety and grossness in an extraordinary degree.
WILLIAM MORRIS.
421
in utter discontent until he finds in Venus herself
the full embodiment of the sensual qualities he has
missed in every woman he has known, and then, after
a space of seeming satisfaction, falls gradually from
phase to phase of mistrust and fear and self-disgust
till he flies headlong from his goddess to seek a field
where repentance and reformation are possible. But
to this man who has estranged himself from his fel-
low-men, to become the slave of his senses, no re-
pentance is possible. The infallible remedy of a
pilgrimage to Rome is, in his case, fallible; for as
he kneels at the very feet of the Pope to confess and
be shriven, comes Venus' self between him and his
salvation, effacing the images of saint and Madonna,
and breathing odours of unholy delicacy between the
would-be penitent and the holy man; so that when
at last his confession is told out to its ending, all
except the name of her who has been his temptress,
he has grown to the unbending conviction that his
doom is to go back to her. What!' he exclaims,
comust I name her, then, ere thou mayst know
What thing I mean? or say where she doth dwell-
A land that new life unto me did show-
Which thou wilt deem a corner cut from Hell,
Set in the world lest all go there too well?
Lo, from THE HILL OF VENUS do I come,
That now henceforth I know shall be my home !"
He sprang up as he spoke, and faced the Pope,
Who through his words had stood there trembling sora,
With doubtful anxious eyes, whence every hope
422
OUR LIVING POETS.
Failed with that last word; a stern look came o'er
His kind vexed face: "Yea, dwell there evermore !"
He cried : “ Just so much hope I have of thee
As on this dry staff fruit and flowers to see !" !
We know the end; how the knight went bắck in
despair to his slavery in the Hill of Venus, never to
be heard of more, and how the Pope's staff blossomed
and bore fruit as a sign that even in so desperate a
case as this there was hope. A terrible open question
this—whether there is a point of slavery to that
hardest of taskmasters, vice, beyond which amend-
ment is impossible! Concerning this ultimate poem.
I can but add that its difficult subject is handled with
such an amount of mastery that it holds its own as
the end of a series comprising such good things as-
are comprised in The Earthly Paradise.
The Fostering of Aslaug, a tale taken from the
Saga of Ragnar Lodbrog, gives simply and beautifully
the history of the hapless infancy and childhood and
happy marriage of that daughter that Brynhild bore
to Sigurd Fafnir’s-bane, before their lives went awry.
The ground-work of the poem is identical with that
of the story of Cinderella, the traditional maiden
whom the Fates are determined to place in her
merited high position, notwithstanding the machina-
tions of harsh and oppressive stepmothers. Between
this legend and the story of Rhodope there is a note-
worthy likeness, quite independent of the grave and
stately grace conferred on each of the two heroines.
WILLIAM MORRIS.
423
by Mr. Morris ; nor should I omit to mention a cer-
tain resemblance between the mere elements of the
elaborate fantasy of Psyche and her god-lover, and
the elements of these simpler tales of Rhodope and
Aslaug and their king-lovers. To some who cannot
l'ead the Saga of Ragnar Lodbrog, this poem may
have an interest beyond its intrinsic interest, when
taken as an episode connected with the Volsung tale.
The history of Bellerophon, in Part IV., is cer-
tainly one of the poet's best works. Of the two
poems into which for convenience sake it is di-
vided, that which deals with the earlier history of
the hero under the title of Bellerophon at Argos
seems greater than that continuing his adventures
under the name of Bellerophon in Lycia. Indeed
the treatment of Queen Sthenoboa, who in the first-
named tale plays Potiphar's wife to Bellerophon's
Joseph, has a fair share of the sweep and grandeur
of touch which the poet' showed in drawing the far
nobler character of Gudrun. Sthenobea is a very.
unlovable character -- one in whom vice is made
hideous, however lovely her person ; and further, the
broad poetic justice with which the Greek legend
deals death to her as the consequence of her criminal
attempt is worked out by the present narrator with
much psychologic cunning. Her lonely and terrible
death by her own hand, after she has failed in her
designs and thinks she has succeeded in taking a
11
424
OUR LIVING POETS.
signal vengeance on the wise Bellerophon, is most
powerful. Bellerophon's character, too, is made and
developed in this tale-admirably made and devel-
oped; while, in the story of his Lycian adventures,
the materials already worked up become the vehicle
for a stirring narrative of events. Then Philonoë,
the ultimate reward of the hero's labours-Philonoë,
the fair and tender maiden, whose love for the hero
inspires her with a greater courage and confidence
than any one of the terror-ridden inhabitants of the
Lycian city can muster—Philonoë, the pure-hearted
and true-hearted, can take no stand beside her evil-
hearted sister Sthenobea as a piece of dramatic crafts-
manship, although she is adequately drawn and tho-
roughly human and real. Again, the Argive King
Prætus is one of the most complete and dispassionate
renderings of pagan life and thought that Mr. Morris
has given us, while the Lycian King Jobates is no-
thing extraordinary in treatment. In Prætus we can
delight, while seeing the good, bad and indifferent of
his character : in Jobates we can scarcely delight.
In fine the characters of the first tale are played
against each other with greater force of deep human
interest, and under circumstances exacting a greater
measure of the artist's best powers, than are the
actors in the second tale.
But putting aside the question of relative merits
in the various tales, it is not too much to say that
WILLIAM MORRIS.
425
the whole Earthly Paradise is such a work as cannot
be found in modern literature regarded as a repertory
of Aryan myth, tradition, and legend. Founded almost
exclusively on tales current at different epochs among
nations of the great Indo-European family, this work
is a more complete and homogeneous collection of
the myths and traditions of that family than any one
hand has yet got together and fused, by stress of in-
dividuality in the rendering, into a luxuriant and
beautiful form. And when to this work is added The
Life and Death of Jason with its many complete
episodes, Mr. Morris's unflagging energy in working
at these legends, that are and always must be so dear
to every Englishman, becomes a matter for no small
astonishment. Were this poet no more than he has
playfully called himself, a "dreamer of dreams born
out of his due time,' the permanency of his works
might be questionable. But whatever he dreams, or
whatever dream of other men he makes his own for
the nonce, is rendered vivid by so much reality, so
much healthiness of landscape and sky, so much truth
of human interest, psychology so sterling as far as it
goes, that with the easy musical flow of his rhythm
and his perfectly individual simplicity of song-lan-
guage, these works must be an heirloom of price for
later generations as long as English poetry is read.
Some readers may start at seeing so modern a word
as ' psychology' connected with Mr. Morris's name;
426 :
OUR LIVING POETS.
but that this least curiously psychological of all our
real poets of the present day has closely studied souls
there can be no moment's doubt. He chooses gene-
rally to treat psychological phenomena of the greatest
simplicity available, and delights not in the setting
or solving of problems of human character. But his
men and women are men and women : they love with
the passion of adult and healthy persons, and not
with the rose-colour sentimentality of boys and girls,
or the pallid and blasé ferocity of jaded roués. Their
life is large and open, and their interest enduring for
living men and women, however far such may be re-
moved by modern use from openness and largeness
in their own lives. In The Lovers of Gudrun the
highest note attainable under these conditions has
been struck : it is a tale to which, rather than to the
Völsunga Saga, I would append the invitation pre-
fixed by the poet to his translation of that saga-
So draw ye round and hearken, English Folk,
Unto the best tale pity ever wrought! ...
Of utter love defeated utterly,
Of Grief too strong to give Love time to die!'
XV.
RICHARD HENRY HORNE.
"..... the Drama's throne-room where
The rulers of our art, in whose full veins
Dynastic glories mingle, sit in strength
And do their kingly work,-conceive, command,
And, from the imagination's crucial heat,
Catch up their men and women all a-flame
For action, all alive and forced to prove
Their life by living out heart, brain, and nerve,
Until mankind makes witness, “ These be men
As we are," and vouchsafes the greeting due
To Imogen and Juliet-sweetest kin
On art's side.'
E. B. BROWNING.
• Truth dwels in gulphs, whose deepes hide shades so rich
That Night sits muffled there in clouds of pitch
More darke than Nature made her; and requires
(To cleare her tough mists) heaven's great fire of fires,
To wrestle with these heaven-strong mysteries.'
G. CHAPMAN.
RICHARD HENRY HORNE.
I
2
It has been long for me a matter of astonishment
that so little is now known to the general public of
Mr. Horne's many admirable works. From time to
time he is named as 'the author of Orion ;' and he
seems to be vaguely conceived of by the present gene-
ration as a brilliant light who flashed one work of
genius in the wide eyes of the world, and then dipped
down once and for all under his particular bushel.
But in fact Mr. Horne has been one of the most pro-
lific of writers and vigorous of workers in general
literature, and has produced several poetic or dra-
matic works as considerable as Orion, and some su-
perior to that in many important respects. Had Mr.
Horne done nothing but Orion, it would not have been
very surprising that, after a few editions of that highly
intellectual epic had been sold, and after the author
had ceased to come prominently before the public,
fresh editions of the poem were no longer imperatively
demanded, and those who wished to obtain it had to
grope about bookstalls in the difficult endeavour to
find an old copy of the sewed pamphlet published first
at the comical price of one farthing. But when one
430
POETS.
TYT
OUR LIVING looks at the long list of good things put before (and
plentifully praised by) the men who grew up with
Tennyson and Browning, and saw the last of Leigh
Hunt and Wordsworth, it seems strange that no suf-
ficient demand was made to force Mr. Horne into
issuing some convenient edition of his poems and
dramas; for, with the exception of The Death of Mar-
lowe, none of these can be readily had.
If asked to define the position of Mr. Horne in
English literature, I should not hesitate to name him
as the tragic dramatist who, since the grand Eliza-
bethan period, has most successfully combined in his
plays the loftier qualities of intellect and emotion with
complete actableness. Actable plays, with no quali-
ties beyond a certain easy actableness, are plentiful
enough; and unactable plays, with high tragic quali-
ties and large intellectuality, might be counted up by
tens and twenties by any person disposed to examine
the dramatic work of England for the last thirty years
or so. But plays fulfilling both sets of requirements
in the same measure as Mr. Horne's do are exceed-
ingly scarce; and the fact that he does not at this
moment hold in the general estimation any such
status as must in fairness be accorded to him is, at
first sight, difficult to account for. The explanation,
however, is not very far to seek. Mr. Horne's want
of sustained and complete success must be set down
to his extraordinary versatility and unflagging energy.
RICHARD HENRY HORNE.
431
When we look at the scores of good magazine and re-
view articles traceable to him, at his many literary
productions below the rank of capital works—when
we hear of his early military services in Mexico and
his late active physical labours at the antipodes,
of his intermediate editorships and lecturings and
writings of an anonymous or pseudonymous class, not
to mention services on commissions of inquiry, and
practical interest taken in swimming questions, &c.
&c. — when we put all these things together, it is
easy to sum up a total of energy which, if all applied
in one direction, would certainly have carried Mr.
Horne's name to any altitude he might have aspired
to see it blazing at. As matters stand, I prefer to
look upon him simply as a powerful dramatic genius
rather than as the man of varied gifts he has shown
himself to be; and thus I may be pardoned for re-
garding even Orion as a digression on a large scale
from the dramatist's legitimate career. The tragic
line is the highest line along which he has moved ;
and we may profitably follow him along that line, to
the exclusion of all his other doings except Orion.
It was in 1843 that this work appeared. The
story of Orion, the giant son of Poseidon, was de-
scribed by a contemporary critic as a 'spiritual epic ;'
and it was not till eleven years later that the author
retorted, in a preface to an Australian edition, that
his work might as properly have been called a 'cor-
432
POETS.
TYXY
OUR LIVING 2
poreal epic,' since it deals with outer life at least as
much as with inner life. He confessed, however, on
that occasion that the poem was meant to work out a
special design, applicable to all times, by means of
antique or classical imagery and associations; and he
explained to his new Australian public that the hero
of his fable was intended to present a type of the
struggle of man with himself—that is the contest
between the intellect and the senses, when the ener-
gies are equally balanced. The didactic purpose of
the piece is indeed perfectly clear; but there is far
too much action in it to justify any one in calling it a
spiritual poem, although there is not that measure of
outwardness or objectivity that one usually associates
with epic poetry. The character of the hero is nobly
conceived as that of a man in whom the practical and
theoretical, the ideal and the real, are fairly com-
bined; and his nature is developed under three phases
of human passion—the ideal or wholly unsensuous,
the hypersensuous, and the final fitting combination
of spiritual and bodily love. A great deal of the action
is obtained by the two transfers of the hero's affec-
tions; for the three phases of his passion have three
separate objects--Artemis the chaste and terrible and
intellectual, Merope the supremely beautiful work of
flesh and blood, and Eos the passion-pure goddess of
the morning. In the working out of all this, how-
ever, there is not sufficient vividness of interest called
RICHARD HENRY HORNE.
433
forth in the fortunes of the actors, no adequate appeal
to the senses, to ensure Orion's ever becoming a per-
manently popular work; and while it is full of fine
poetic feeling, it lacks that quality of convincingly
real life found so plentifully in many works that soar
much less high in regard to scope and purpose. No
one could read Orion without seeing in every page the
distinctive marks of poetry; and, above all, none could
fail to observe passage upon passage of that all-im-
portant compactness of make only found in high
poetry: indeed there are lines in Orion that one must
go far to surpass, as for instance,
"The long gray horizontal wall of the dead-calm sea,'
which, scan it as you please, embodies a world of
oceanic stillness; and there is something of the same
weighty propriety in the lines,
And iron-crowned Night her black breath poured around,
To meet the clouds that from Olympos rolled
Billows of darkness with a dirging roar.'
After the author had made his literary début with
the Exposition of the False Medium and the Barrier's
excluding Men of Genius from the Public, he seems to
have settled at once on the drama as his proper field;
for his next volume was Spirit of Peers and People,
a national Tragi-comedy and Satire, and at about the
same time he contributed to an annual The Fctches,
a very brief three-act tragedy. The tragi-comedy
has a great deal of dramatic movement; but there
1
FT
434
OUR LIVING POETS.
the poet paid too much attention to satirising the
political persons of the day to leave free scope for his
dramatic talent; and the work is essentially local in
its tone. The F'etches, on the other hand, is as
interesting now as it was then; but it is too subtle
and compressed and limited in action to be a perfect
success in the hands of one whose talent lies so dis-
tinctly in the domain of the acting, or at all events
actable, drama.
The next two works, Cosimo de' Medici and The
Death of Marlowe, quite took by storm the friends of
legitimate tragedy in 1837. In these plays there is
nothing that betrays a weak or faltering hand. Never
to be characterised as merely imitative of Elizabethan
dramas, they are yet full of the spirit of that epoch
so far as it inspired works full of truth and passion,
appealing to the minds and hearts of men who were
refined and knew something of real life, and, at the
same time, meeting the requirements of the stage in
contradistinction to those of the study only. It was
in those days that English playwrights best knew
how, in transcribing human life, to organise the
transcript into a spectacle, preserving a just and
noble balance between the appeal to an audience's
sense of stirring outward action, and the appeal to
man's deeper sense of things emotional and intel-
lectual. Mr. Horne has followed those playwrights
religiously in these things. He has not borrowed
RICHARD HENRY HORNE.
435
thoughts and phrases from them, he has copied them
in no stage-tricks, has never mistrusted his own ori-
ginality, and has eschewed most of their faults. Yet
we often come upon lines of a weight and grandeur
reminding us of Beaumont and Fletcher, upon pas-
sages of almost extravagant soaring loftiness sugges-
tive of no man but the sublime Kit Marlowe, upon
brilliant sparkling scenes of a raciness and vigour
that recall the exuberant animal spirits of Shake-
speare, and upon dread depths of human passion
that send the mind back upon the awful craftsman-
ship of John Webster.
All these characteristics, seen in luxuriant plenty
in Cosmo de' Medici, which is a full five-act tragedy,
are found also in the one act that constitutes The
Death of Marlowe; but the essential greatness, whe-
ther of the larger or of the smaller play, is in the fine
conception of the characters and action, and the admir-
able fitness of the execution. Christopher Marlowe
and Duke Cosmo the First of Tuscany are both men
with whom history or tradition has dealt hardly ;
while no historian or tradition-monger has been able
to 'heap up words' high enough to hide and bury
away from the piercing sight of genius and generosity
of soul those indelible marks of lofty character and
fine aim which those two great men carved deep into
their respective spheres of life. In the brief career
of the dramatist who indicated lines for even Shake-
1
CUI
436
OUR LIVING POETS.
spcare to follow, who, albeit extravagant and un-
bridled in his imagination, yet carried the art of tragic
poetry into regions pure and rare from their very alti-
tude, Mr. Horne discerned something more than the
recklessness and even wantonness often ascribed to
him; and in Marlowe's premature death, the modern
dramatist saw suggestions of something very far re-
moved from the vulgar last wriggle. of a mud-worm
in his kindred muck, which those must have had in
mind who helped to fabricate and land down the tale
of Marlowe's death being brought about in a low
drinking-brawl. And, in like manner, that dark deed
of Cosmo's, the slaying of his younger son Garcia-a
deed so revolting to the mind, regarded in the light
usually thrown upon it-is seen by Mr. Horne as far
other than an act of mere savage vengeance executed
on the younger son for the sake of the elder, who
had, through some mischance, fallen by his brother's
hand.
The molive of each play will only be seized in its
entirety by such as choose to read the works for them-
selves, carefully and more than once or twice. In
The Death of Marlowe, the most important point in
the life of two souls is worked upon with an extra-
ordinary fervour and concentration of brain-power.
Marlowe has conceived an overwhelming, perhaps
fantastic passion, such as Marlowe would have con-
ceived if his works tell truth of his nature, for a
RICHARD HENRY HORNE.
437
beautiful woman-Cecilia, the runaway once virtuous
wife of the Drunkard Bengough.' This passion,
fraught with manly respect, has blinded him to all but
the finer parts of the woman's nature, and might have
led him, had things gone well, to a settlement of cha-
racter and directness of aim such as the man never
in truth came to. Cecilia, on the other hand, breathed
upon by the loftiness of the genuine passion Mar-
lowe has conceived and avowed for her, a mere cour-
tesan, grows to hate her life, and care only for those
better elements of her nature which he discerns and
dwells upon with a dramatist's idealising force ; so
that all is in a fair way for the indefinite raising of
two souls. But before this flower of promise can be
brought to wholesome fruit, the accumulated sins of
men and women-Cecilia among the number, and
Marlowe among the number—are brought to one of
those deadly fruits that poison the offenders' selves.
Jack-o'-night,' a tavern-pander and pimp, stung by
words of scorn that Cecilia utters in her remorse for
that old life he has so often helped along its ugly
way, excites Marlowe, the cause of her change, to at-
tack him; and the dramatist falls, stabbed with his
own sword.
It might have been thought that to develop a fe-
male character from a reckless courtesan to a thought-
ful and right-souled woman, in the space of one very
moderate act, would be a task almost impossible to
438
OUR LIVING POETS.
accomplish without inartistic abruptness—especially
when so much else had to be done in the space as
was done in The Death of Marlowe; but it is not
too much to say that, in the new edition of this little
work, the psychological treatment of Cecilia is fault-
less and ample -- though in the first edition a good
deal now depicted was left to the imagination : two
new scenes, in which Mr. Horne has introduced Ce-
cilia, give a fresh perfection to what was originally
not defective; and these scenes now seem so essen-
tial, that one can hardly realise one's old enjoyment
of the play without them. The interpolated passage
on the awakening of the woman contains some of the
finest touches. The last words of Cecilia before this
scene are
Cur
• Cursed ! accursed be the freaks of Nature,
That mar us from ourselves, and make our acts
The scorn and loathing of our afterthoughts
The finger-mark of Conscience, who, most treacherous,
Wakes to accuse, but slumber'd o'er the sin.'
She is here only in an unwholesome state of revolt
against her unwholesome life, and has not attained to
a noble sorrow-she is but half awakened; and the
new scene marks a most important stage in the growth
and change of her discontent with herself. When
Marlowe asks her to stay one moment, and she re-
plies that that is not much to ask, and he has retorted
with one of his rhapsodic love-utterances, she breaks
forth with a genuine sickness of soul-
RICHARD HENRY HORNE.
439
1
0, sir, you make me very sad at heart;
Let's speak no more of this. I am on my way
To walk beside the river.'
Then, after repeated denial of his request for permis-
sion to go with her, and after one more rhapsody
poured forth by him in her praise, she resumes the
whole tragedy of her repentant soul in the words,
Considering all things, this is bitter sweet'-betrays
the birth, or re-birth, of healthy unselfish instincts
in the little speech, -'Ah! Kit Marlowe,-you think
too much of memand of yourself too little !—and
goes with a promise to return and bid him good-
night on her way home. All this, coming immedi-
ately before the catastrophe, opens up innumerable
suggestions of undeveloped possibilities, and serves
to throw up, on a background of heightened regret,
the terrible pathos of the close. The death-scene is
one of the most impetuous actions in the whole range
of modern tragedy. The fierce current of Marlowe's
despair at the blighting of his hopes about Cecilia,
and at the ignominious manner of his death, comes
with such force as to strike a puerile tremor even
into the heart of the 'rabid cur' whose reckless hand
has set the current free ; and the reader has only just
time to draw a breath of relief after the awful and
sudden stillness of Marlowe's death before Cecilia
rushes in ‘like a gust of wind,' as Middleton ex-
presses it, and puts the climax on the highly-strung
agony of the situation by her lament over Marlowe's
440
OUR LIVING POETS.
corpse. The author has not made the mistake of
piling the one sorrow close on the top of the other,
but has given just the breathing-space alluded to
above by adding some sharp firm final strokes to the
masterly portrait of Jack-o'-night, who with true
“poetic justice' is seized and dragged off to the gal-
lows 'for sundry villanies committed.'
But the conversancy shown in this little work with
the deep lore of human souls, and with the loftiest
principles of tragic poetry, as well as the technical
requirements of the stage drama, is shown in fivefold
measure in the five-act tragedy of Cosmo de' Medici ;
and it is good to note the nature of the dramatist's
interpretation of the sombre and obscure page of
Florentine history he chose on that occasion for a
groundwork. His Cosmo is a man of grand aims,
and of hopes centred in his elder son Giovanni; and
when those hopes are brought to dust and ashes
through the fatal quarrel of Giovanni and Garcia, he
is convinced of an appalling blackness of guilt on the
younger's part, and solemnly performs the office of
executioner rather than submit to the disgrace of a
public.execution. His deed is done in deep anguish
of soul; and he never recovers the blow, which is
aggravated tenfold by the subsequent discovery that
Giovanni was the aggressor, and Garcia acted in self-
defence. I cannot here follow the unravelling of this
dreadful tangle of mischance and misapprehension.
V
RICHARD HENRY HORNE.
441
SA
The coil is brought about and unravelled by the au-
thor with exceptional ability and nobleness of idea;
and the whole work abounds in passages that would
stand in almost any companionship for breadth and
ease of expression, and beauty or incision of thought.
One of the finest speeches in the play is that of Cosmo
after the boys are dead, when he is consulted as to
the execution of some pirates : it is compressed into
less than three lines:
Set them all free!
Death bath two noble gifts, and well can wait
For the flaw'd casts from man's precarious mould.?
An interpolated scene in which Cosmo is depicted
reeling on the verge of insanity, and which appeared
later in The Monthly Review, is as masterly as any-
thing of the kind done in these days.
When those two pieces were produced, Mr. Horne
was working with great fervour towards the regenera-
tion of the stage. Those two contributions were dar-
ingly intellectual, looking at the poor nature of the
bulk of what audiences found acceptable; but three:
years later, when the regeneration appears to have
been still a living possibility for Mr. Horne, he made
in his Gregory VII. a flight higher still in daring
intellectuality; for this, the last published of his
five-act tragedies—was carried through without the
assistance of the more obvious passions of humanity.
Here again he followed his former bent of recon-
structing an historical conception. The Monk Hil--
e
442
OUR LIVING POETS.
debrand, who deposed and elected popes by strong
command of character, and finally rose to the pope-
dom himself under the title of Gregory VII., is
painted by some as a very devil of iniquity; whereas
the dramatist, recognising more than personal am-
bition in the career of the man who established the
supremacy of the Church over all other sovereignties,
and created a nevy system of things which endured
nearly five hundred years after his death,' has given
to his Gregory VII. all the weight of one acting so
as to lead an age, and acting with full consciousness
as to what manner of work he is about. Gregory
thus appears as a great soul in troublous times, and
with the full measure of unscrupulousness that trou-
blous times cast upon a great soul; if his work be one
of remodelling. How strongly the man, as here por-
trayed, can act or wait with equal purpose—can keep
his mind fixed on large and splendid ideas while con-
templating even a dark murder-is well shown in his
soliloquy after he has struck Pope Alexander at high
mass, because that weak occupant of St. Peter's chair
had vailed the crest of the papacy to the Emperor
Henry IV. of Germany. In psychological grasp and
dramatic ability Gregory VII. is, if anything, an ad-
vance on Cosmo de' Medici ; but the author seems to
have found it a hopeless task to stem the downward
current of English dramatic taste, and to have left
off writing tragedies on this noblest of models.
RICHARD HENRY HORNE.
443
Nevertheless his bent has once and again shown
itself to be unmistakably dramatic; for he published
in 1848 the mystery play Judas Iscariot; in 1852 an
acting edition of Webster's Duchess of Malſi, most
carefully and ably reconstructed for the modern stage;
and in 1864 his latest important work, Prometheus
the Fire-bringen-a fine attempt to restore the lost
first play of the Promethean trilogy. Even as late
as 1870 he put forth, as an appendix to the Cheva-
lier de Chatelain's Merchant of Venice, a dramatic
revcrie,' working out the judgment-scene in that play
so as to accord with modern biological science-an-
other fact that shows the persistent dramatic turn of
his mind. It was this persistent dramatic turn of
mind, no doubt, that gave to his Prometheus a con-
geniality wanting in Orion,—the Greek lyric drama
being more akin than blank-verse narrative to his
darling models of the Elizabethan era. The mystery
or miracle play is still nearer akin ; and Judas Is-
cariot is one of the author's finest works-ranking
with the three Elizabethan tragedies, as one must
call them for want of a better term.
This mystery play is based on the same view of
the betrayal of Christ as is adopted in Mr. Story's
epistle from a “Roman Lawyer;' but while the Ro-
man lawyer's account amounts to a special pleading
in favour of Judas's purity of intention, Mr. Horne's
play merely paints the betrayer as free from the
444
OUR LIVING POETS.
utterly grovelling motive attributed to him by the
popular tradition. No less an ecclesiastic than Arch-
bishop Whately seems to have espoused the more
lenient view of Judas; and Mr. Horne, taking his
cue from the learned churchman, embraced the idea
with all the passion of a dramatist, while guarding,
as he expresses it, ' against the evil of being led
away by the freshness and force of this new point of
vision, into making a sort of hero of so great a crimi-
nal.' Iscariot's 'gross personal interests, his craving
for worldly pomp, and power, and exterminating ven-
geance upon all enemies,' Mr. Horne has regarded
as 'the antitheses to all true heroism. He has made
the crime of the betrayal revolting enough without
supposing the traitor to have been actuated by a
mere purposeless malignity, or by a mere sordid mo-
tive of the most trivial kind; and while throughout
the piece Judas is kept hideously apart from all
wholesome communion with his fellow-creatures, the
appalling gloom of the man's remorse, and the awful
horror of his end, are given with that truth of tragic
art which leaves the reader profoundly moved with
compassion. One of the best scenes is that showing
up the two-fold character of Judas as worldly calculator
and enthusiastic believer in Christ's godhead. The
keeper of the purse soliloquises fitly enough in a keen
analytic vein ; but added to this is that part of the
man's nature which is Mr. Horne's special creation :-
V
50
RICHARD HENRY HORNE.
445
"He passeth on
Teaching and healing, nor can I discern
One smile of secret consciousness that soon
All this shall end and his true kingdom, come.
Somewhat he lacketh. He is great of soul,
Filled with divine power, but too angel-sweet
For turbulent earth and its gross exigencies ;
Strong in design, and magnanimity,
Forbearance, fortitude, and lovingness,
He lacketh still the vehement kingly will-
Will, bred of earth and all that it inherits
To seize the mountain by its forest hair
And whirl it into dust. On that soft plain,
The Temple of his Father--the true Spirit-
Straightway might we erect, and not lie bid
In secret places, like forlorn wild beasts
Who dread the hunter's spear. Why doth he wait?
Would he were seized !-condemned to instant death
Set on a brink, and all his hopes for man
Endangered by his fall-till these extremes
Dret violent lightning from him !----Burning thoughts
Why haunt ye thus my brain-so oft—so fiercely-
As though 'twere mine to do your bidding--mine,
To touch his garment with this dreadful torch. (He pauses.)
And yet the intolerable fantasy
Creeps ever down my forehead-round my feet-
Until a deed comes crouching at my hand,
Which beckon'd not, but cannot chase away!'
This tremendous realisation of the necessity to put
his traitorous scheme into execution is masterly; and
the conception has been finely carried out in another
scene wherein the man's mind, here already begin-
ning to give objective existence to its own creations,
sees ghosts and phantoms besetting his path and
only giving way as he passes through them, deter-
mined to do the deed he has imagined.
I would fain have given a circumstantial account of
Mr. Horne's very eventful career in literature; but I
446
POETS.
YT
OUR LIVING Icu
do not think I could better employ the space I have
to spare than in the foregoing remarks on his dra-
matic works, which are thoroughly good in all respects.
Chiefly, the types of humanity are excellent and va-
rious. The author uttered in his Essay on Tragic
Influence a grand text for a poet of his proclivities :
- The duty of the dramatist is simply to be true to
his men and women.' And this text he has followed
if ever dramatist did. The whole of his characters-
male or female, bad, good, or indifferent—are co-
herent, compact, and lifelike; they are all acting,
thinking men and women - generally those whose
stirring circumstances give a goodly zest to the spec-
tator of their lives; and in each situation they act
and speak in perfect accordance with the general idea
of their characters. Were it not so, it would be com-
paratively little that Mr. Horne had made so urgent
an attempt to reclaim the stage in England; but, as
it is so, his life in his countrymen's minds is insured
on the absolute security' principle. Even if he follow
the allotted course of men of genius, and remain un-
appreciated awhile, the end is yet no less certain-
that his dramatic works will be regarded as among
the best and loftiest of their kind.
i
XVI.
HENRY TAYLOR.
The excess of Life in those whose passionate activity was ac-
companied by intellect, imagination, designs, and deeds, becomes
transmissible in full action of heart and head from age to age,
exactly in proportion to the truth and completeness with which
their characters and actions are chronicled, and brought home to
the intense abstract interests and individual sympathies of man-
kind.'-R. H. HORNE.
HENRY TAYLOR.
IT were no impossible task to deduce a dramatist's
views on life from his plays, because, although his
duty ‘is simply to be true to his men and women,'
his men and women will be so conceived that, with-
out dereliction of that duty, he will make his plays
emphasise what he feels emphatically in his inmost
soul. His profound and earnest truths will be placed
in the mouths of profound and earnest personages,
and his sprightly unimportant sayings will be so
thrown in as to take on no more importance than the
artist, in his heart, awards to their correlative views
and sentiments. It is entertaining to note the curi-
ous opinions and sentiments constantly attributed to
Shakespeare for want of proper observance of the cir-
cumstances under which the words quoted are uttered
in his plays : by this means it is possible that the
vast sanity and largeness of soul that Shakespeare
undoubtedly owned should be misrepresented by any
careless person who might attribute to him some
leprous sentiment of the Moor Aaron or some devilish
villany of Iago's. But beside the sayings of a dra-
matist's men and women, we have to take into ac-
GG
450
OUR LIVING POETS.
count their doings, and also to observe the doings of
depicted circumstance in modifying the characters as
conceived in the rough : if this were done with care
and insight one might succeed in developing from
any collection of serious plays a treatise on the modes
and phases of human existence. In the case of Sir
Henry Taylor's plays, no amount of care and insight
of this kind would be ill bestowed; but the dramatist
has himself on divers occasions chosen to speak to
his readers as man to man; and whoever pleases to
read Sir Henry Taylor's essays may learn with much
personal advantage, in a direct manner, somewhat of
the wisdom and knowledge of nature which, in an
indirect manner, is set forth in various dramatic
works, -and, be it also stated, much wisdom and
knowledge not as yet embodied by the author in such
compositions. On all subjects that he treats in prose
Sir Henry Taylor is a notably sane and competent
authority; and in all his dramatic conceptions sanity
and nobleness of thought are salient qualities.
Of his essays, the celebrated one On Money*
seems to me less original and important than most,-
less important because it is more markedly than the
rest applicable to the lives of the upper ten thou-
sand, and less original because there are not in it
any thoughts with which thinking people need be
unfamiliar even if they have never seen the essay.
* Notes from Life, London, 1847.
D
HENRY TAYLOR.
451
HU
But the little treatise On Wisdom* takes a much
higher standing, as being of general applicability and
of marked originality: also it seems to comment on
what is unquestionably the author's masterpiece, -
his great dramatic romance, Philip Van Artevelde,
published in 1834. There is a profound truth in
the conception of wisdom set forth in the following
words :
Wisdom is not the same with understanding, talents, capacity,
ability, sagacity, sense, or prudence-not the same with any one
of these; neither will all these together make it up. It is that
exercise of the reason into which the heart enters—& structure of
the understanding rising out of the moral and spiritual nature. ...
Great intellect.... is certainly exposed to unusual temptations ;
for as power and pre-eminence lie before it, so ambition attends it,
which, whilst it determines the will and strengthens the activities,
inevitably weakens the moral fabric.'
Philip Van Artevelde, in the first of the two plays
bearing his name, is placed before us as a calm, wise,
thoughtful man, leading, in very troublous times, an
even life apart from the turbulence of the factions
rending the social fabric of his native town Ghent.
His main public occupation being that of angling, he
is chiefly reputed as a good quiet gentleman skilled
in taking river fish; and the perfect knowledge of
the times acquired by him in his lonely pursuits, to
say nothing of intellectual power and philosophic re-
sources and firm self-government, developed in his
calm life and in sessions of thoughtful converse with
his wise preceptor, Father John of Heda, are entirely
* Notes from Life.
T
452
OUR LIVING POETS.
unrecognised by the stirring and striving Ghents-
men. But the reader has not been long with this
quiet man before he finds out that there is here the
greatness of soul needed for leadership; and when,
partly from the fact that Philip's father has been
chief in Ghent before him, partly from the imminent
fall of the bloodthirsty men in command, partly from
the enmity of one who wishes to see him in a dan-
gerous position, Philip has the option of leaving his
calm life for the troublesome captaincy of Ghent, the
issue of his choice is clear. He demands but two
hours to think the matter over; and no sooner is
Van den Bosch, who offers the captaincy, gone from
him, than we know Philip's purpose is taken—and
taken with that best wisdom of the heart that leads
a man to step into any sphere he sees he can occupy
with advantage to his fellows. There are two matters
that come into the question beside what lies simply
between himself and Ghent—first the duty of aveng-
ing his father, perfidiously slain by Ghentsmen at
his own door, and secondly the duty of living to pro-
tect a much-loved only sister-a duty whereof the
performance must naturally be imperilled by accept-
ance of a high position in times of battle, murder,
and sudden death. In Philip's soliloquy after the
departure of Van den Bosch these things are finely
balanced ; but we feel nonetheless that the solution
is reached :
HENRY TAYLOR.
453
Is it vain-glory which thus whispers me
That 'tis ignoble to have led my life
In idle meditations—that the times
Demand me, echoing my father's name?
Oh! what a fiery heart was his ! such souls
Whose sudden visitations daze the world,
Vanish like lightning, but they leave behind
A voice that in the distance far away
Wakens the slumbering ages. Oh! my father!
Thy life is eloquent, and more persuades
Unto dominion than thy death deters;
For that reminds me of a debt of blood
Descended with my patrimony to me,
Whose paying off would clear my soul's estate.'
In the fourteenth century this duty of vengeance was
so much a matter of course that we can only hold
Philip in respect for feeling it as a duty, and must
not let it seem to detract from his magnanimity.
Throughout the first part of the work, Van Arte-
velde, elected thus to the leadership, shows the same
strength of heart and quickness of perception evinced
in this first step, and leads the citizens through
trouble upon trouble to a state of glorious independ-
ence, by always striking the right track at the right
moment,—till at last his course is crowned with the
high honour and responsibility of the Regency of
Flanders. It is then, and not before, that ambition
steps in to 'weaken the moral fabric. As Captain of
Ghent he has sufficient occupation in resisting the
arrogance of the Earl of Flanders and setting his
fellow-citizens in their right standing; and, being
led on by noble patriotism rather than by personal
ambition, he is kept at that grand level that a mag-
454
OUR LIVING POETS.
nificent nature can always attain in full employment
under fitting circumstances. But when he has suc-
ceeded in every undertaking, driven the Earl out of
his hereditary dominions, placed Ghent absolutely at
the head of Flanders, and well-nigh at the head of
Europe, and assumed the Regency, he has reached
the point at which his own soul will not let him fall
back into any kind of quietness, and the urgency and
vigorous movement of the times will not let him stand
still. And so, the reader, who has seen in the first
play the splendid triumph of a splendid character,
has to look on in the second play while that same
character passes through a sad and sombre decadence
to a violent death.
Although the first play seems to me to be some-
what finer on the whole than the second, it is doubt-
ful whether the great vigour and power of shaping
character and action in the one are not countervailed
by the pathos of the other; and indeed there are
but few things in contemporary literature more pro-
foundly pathetic than this fall of a fine soul. The
Captain of Ghent, fresh from an open life of sound
self-discipline and culture, could resolutely ascend
the steps of the stadt-house in that memorable scene
that ends the second act, and play out the part re-
solved on beforehand in stabbing one of the treacher-
ous messengers who had attempted to negotiate a
disgraceful and disastrous peace between Ghent and
HENRY TAYLOR.
455
the Earl; and he thus discharged his duty of trust
together with his duty of vengeance ; for the mes-
sengers, of whom he stabbed one and Van den Bosch
the other, were the same men who had slain Philip's
father. But the Regent of Flanders, deprived of the
tenderly loving wife who crowned and shared the
successes of the Captain of Ghent, turned from his
fresh and vigorous perceptions by courtly emulations
and contact with a corrupt society, led by passion to
form a liaison with the estranged mistress of the
Duke of Bourbon, has not, at a critical moment, the
unbending strength of purpose to persist in the exe-
cution of the treacherous Sir Fleureant of Heurlée,
who quits him for his clemency by stabbing him
when his life is of the utmost impotance to his cause.
It cannot be truly said that Philip wittingly sacrificed
his cause, the cause of Flemish liberty, to his passion
for Elena; but, as the play stands, there is at least
a probable connection between his contract with her
and the disastrous issue of the struggle with France :
—it is Elena that begs him to spare Sir Fleureant,
though justly condemned to death; and when he
does spare him it is on the condition that, in the
event of the Regent's fall, the knight shall befriend
the lady against her sometime protector, the Duke of
Bourbon : when the battle is going against the Flem-
ings, and nothing but the sight of their dauntless
leader will keep them from rout, Sir Fleureant spreads
456
OUR LIVING POETS.
the word that Artevelde is down, and watching his
moment, gives his rumour a bloody truthfulness by
his dastardly dagger-thrust.
When Artevelde's force is routed, and Artevelde's
self lies dead, and the tragedy has been duly summed
up with the death of Sir Fleureant by Elena's frantic
hand, and her death by the pikes of men at arms, the
Duke of Burgundy thwarts the spite of the Duke of
Bourbon in a grand comment fitly closing the work:
· Bourbon. Take forth the bodies. For the woman's corse,
Let it have Christian burial. As for his,
The arch-insurgent's, hang it on a tree
Where all the host may see it.
Burgundy.
Brother, no;
It were not for our honour, nor the king's,
To use it so. Dire rebel though he was,
Yet with a noble nature and great gifts
Was he endow'd,-courage, discretion, wit,
An equal temper and an ample soul,
Rock-bound and fortified against assaults
Of transitory passion, but below
Built on a surgiug subterranean fire
That stirr'd and lifted him to high attempis.
So prompt and capable, and yet so calm,
He nothing lack'd in sovereignty but the right,
Nothing in soldiership except good fortune.
Wherefore with honour lay him in his grave,
And thereby shall increase of honour come
Unto their arms who vanquish'd one so wise,
So valiant, so renown'd. Sirs, pass we on,
And let the bodies follow us in biers.
Wolf of the weald and yellow-footed kite,
Enough is spread for you of meaner prey.
Other interment than your maws afford
Is due to these. At Courtray we shall sleep,
And there I'll see them buried side by side.
In Isaac Comnenus, published in 1827, and the
HENRY TAYLOR.
457
earliest of the author's acknowledged dramas, the
hero is conceived in something of the same spirit
that Philip is conceived in. Isaac, like Philip, is a
man of foresight, energy, and dauntlessness, ready
to step into greatness, but not anxious for it. But
there is a cynical element in the character of Isaac
that we do not get in Philip; and while the one,
achieving his greatness, lets himself be carried into
all the pomp of greatness, the other, having tri-
umphed completely over his enemies and won a crown,
places that crown on the head of his younger brother,
resolves to retire into quiet life, and is only prevented
from doing so by the tragic death that fate has stored
for him. Isaac's masterly state of preparation for
all emergencies is finely depicted in two scenes of the
second act. In one he is shown in consultation with
his friends as to the course to be pursued in a great
danger : it is clear that the Emperor of the East and
the Patriarch of the Greek Church (the scene is at
Constantinople, at the end of the eleventh century)
meditate an attack on him, as obnoxious to both
church and state : in the midst of his council, Theo-
dora, the Emperor's daughter, enamoured of Comne-
nus, comes to renew overtures favourable to him but
treasonable to her father; and close on her heels
arrives the imperial guard with a summons for Isaac
to attend a synod at that time assembled. The whole
body of men is admitted, overpowered, and disarmed ;
UU
L
1
458
POETS.
TAN
OUR LIVING 11
and Isaac, having given full directions to his friends, .
prepares to march to the palace, and answer the sum-
mons, his own bodyguard surrounding the disarmed
imperial guard. In the next scene the Emperor, the
Patriarch, and many ecclesiastics are discovered in
synod, awaiting the arrival of Comnenus; and they
are thrown into confusion by the announcement that
he has arrived at the head of his own men. What
follows is exceedingly fine; and I extract it:
Patriarch. Silence, my lords, what craven cries be these ?
Your Majesty will please send some one forth
To draw your forces from the suburbs round.
I tell you take your seats. Ho! God is great!
His Church is mighty, and that might have we.
I say, bring up the Count.
Several voices.
He's coming up.
Patriarch. I say, then, let him come.
Enter COMNENUS, who walks to the foot of the table,
the crowd falling back on either side.
Comnenus. I'm here to answer to your summons.
Patriarch.
LO!
Almighty God is present in his Church !
His Church is present here!
How hast thou dared then to profane this presence
By coming here in arms? Give up thy sword.
[COMNENUS ungirds his sword and flings it on the table.
Connenus (after some pause). What would ye have with it
that cannot use it?
My lords, ye do but mock me: here am I
Brought by your midnight summons from my house,
And ye have nought to say. Ye do but mock me.
Patriarch. We mock thee not: 'tis thou that mock'st high
heaven.
Thou’rt summon'd here on many an ugly count
Of sacrilege and heresy and schism,
Which so thou answer not and clear thy fame,
We shall, in due acquittance of our trust,
Pronounce the interdict from fire and water,
And cut thee off from Christian fellowship.
HENRY TAYLOR.
459
Comnenus. My lords, or e'er ye do inhibit me
From fire and water, have it you in charge
I cut not off yourselves from earth and air.
My lords, this world is not so all your own
That ye can grant away the elements
Amongst your friends, and lock one moiety up
From them that like you not. Ye kneel and pray
That God will make you humble as the dust,
Then, rising, arrogate omnipotence,
And shake the ashes from your shaven crowns.
But I will teach you veriest lowliness.
Patriarch (holds up the cross and pronounces the adjur-
ation," Ecce crucem Domini ' fugite partes adversæ!'').
A man possess'd—'tis Sathan speaks, not he!
The father of lies hath spoken by his mouth
An exorcist for this demoniac straight
To disenchant his body of the fiend!
Comnenus. Ye charge your own malignancy on me.
A demonocracy of unclean spirits
Hath govern'd long these synods of your Church,
The Antichrist foretold: and I am he
Who, in the fulness of the approaching time,
Will exorcise you all. Expect my coming.
[Exit.
.
To me there is something truly magnificent in
the action and bearing of Comnenus at this juncture,
- a might of spirit worthy of large handling and
handled with a largeness not often seen in plays of
these times. The amount of movement and excite-
ment that the author has infused into these two
scenes is among the most remarkable features of his
works. Indeed, although Isaac Comnenus is the
youngest of them, there is nothing at all immature
about it, - the chief indication of short experience
being a great fondness for long scientific words. The
conception is profound and the execution powerful
throughout; and there is in especial one piece of
460
OUR LIVING POETS.
psychology that is admirably carried through. Isaac
Comnenus shows a certain factitious buoyancy of
speech and bearing that is at first a little puzzling;
and it is not until we are let see, in the third act,
that there is a frightful void in his heart, over which
the nimble fireflies of his half bitter speech have
been keeping up their artificial buzz and dance, that
we comprehend his manner fully. The tragedy of
his antecedents, disclosed in his churchyard soliloquy
over the grave of the lost Irene, whom he seems to
have loved too much, is finely balanced and comple-
mented by the tragic close, —his assassination by
Theodora, whose love he has rejected.
The capital point in Edwin the Fair, the play
which followed Philip Van Artevelde at an interval of
eight years, is the conception and treatment of Dun-
stan, the much-maligned Abbot of Glastonbury. His
made-up miracles are capitally brought before us,
and subtly defended by the abbot himself; and,
what is best, the mountebank side of his character
is entirely subordinated to that spirit of enthusiastic
leadership that placed him at the head of the Church
party as opposed to the Secular party. Dunstan is
not a lovable character ; but he is respectable by
virtue of his unity of purpose and dominance of per-
sonality in the midst of a troubled social scene. In
the rendering of the boy-king Edwin, too, there is
much beauty. Carried away by his passion for El-
HENRY TAYLOR.
461
giva, he is yet no mere weakling; and we get a fine
suggestion of what his youth held undeveloped in
the scene between him and Dunstan in the tower,
where the abbot, after subduing the youth's spirit by
starvation, offers him the alternative of abdication or
death. The whole king in him breaks out triumph-
antly when Dunstan, after contrasting the joys of
private life and the uneasiness of kingdom, asks
What call is thine
From God or man, what voice within bids thee
Such pleasures to forego, such cares confront?
Edwin. What voice? My kingdom's voice--my people's cry,
Whom ye devour—the wail of shepherds true
Over their flocks, those godly, kindly priests
That love my people and love me withal-
Their voice requires me, and the voice of kings
Who died with honour and who lire in me,
The voice of Egbert, Ethelbert, and Alfred.
What wouldst thou more? the voice of kings unborn
To whom my sceptre and my blood descends--
A thousand voices call me.'
Up to the issue of Edwin the Fair (1842), Sir
Henry Taylor's dramas were exclusively tragic; and
his latest work in this kind, St. Clement's Eve (1862),
is also a historic tragedy like the rest; but between
Edwin the Fair and that, came a play of a very dif-
ferent character,—A Sicilian Summer", published in
1850 under the title of The Virgin Widow. Lighter
in style than any of the others, it is as enjoyable as
the best and weightiest; and while the historic tra-
gedies recall the manner of Shakespeare's historic
plays, this lighter work recalls the manner of Much
462
OUR LIVING POETS.
:
Ado about Nothing and other dramas in that style.
Indeed A Sicilian Summer is just as sprightly and
vivacious in its airier movement as Isaac, Philip,
and Edwin are direct and vivid and earnest in their
more solid and serious progress; and while the events
of this entertaining play go over in that glib and
opportune manner one expects in dramas that are
not tragic, there is really no approach to triviality in
the whole matter. The work is as well freighted with
significance and thoughtfulness as Sir Henry Taylor's
other works are. The two girls, Rosalba and Fior-
deliza, recall the contrast of womanhood shown in
Philip Van Artevelde between the sweet and tender
Adriana and the quick, sprightly Clara, no less ten-
der at heart for her lightness of manner; and both
contrasts recall again that immortal counterpoint of
human delineation executed by Shakespeare in Hero
and Beatrice. But none of these four heroines of
our own day go close enough to Shakespeare's to lose
their own self-sufficiency and individuality, any more
than Silisco and Ruggiero in A Sicilian Summer lack
original personality, or fatherhood to fine sayings,
while showing clear relationships of manner and cir-
cumstance with the men of The Merchant of Venice.
Ruggiero's caution to the players is capitally put :
2
and might I speak
My untaught mind to you that know your art,
I should beseech you not to stare and gasp
And quiver, that the infection of the sense
HENRY Sy
463
TAYLOR.
May make our flesh to creep; for as the hand
By tickling of our skin may make us laugh
More than the wit of Plautus, so these tricks
May make us shudder. But true art is this,
To set aside your sorrowful pantomime,
Pass by the senses, leave the flesh at rest,
And working by the witcheries of words
Felt in the fulness of their import, call
Men's spirits from the deep; that pain may thus
Be glorified, and passion flashing out
Like nois less lightning in a summer's night,
Show Nature in her bounds from peak to chasm,
Awful, but not terrific.'
And again, his comment on a speech about to be
pronounced is admirably good as a piece of critical
wisdom :
“'Tis a speech
That by a language of familiar lowness
Enhances what of more heroic vein
Is next to follow. But one fault it hath :
It fits too close to life's realities,
In truth to Nature missing truth to Art;
For Art commends not counterparts and copies,
But from our life a nobler life would shape,
Bodies celestial from terrestrial raise,
And teach us, not jejunely what we are,
But what we may be when the Parian block
Yields to the hand of Phidias.'
The story of this play is extremely interesting, -a
mere love story without any harrowing tragedy, and
charmingly sustained and suspended. Its spright-
liness is always distinct from levity, and its serious-
ness always distinct from heaviness.
St. Clement's Eve, the latest of this series of sterl-
ing works (1862), does not seem to me to be quite as
firmly put together or as largely carried out as any
464
OUR LIVING POETS.
of its forerunners, although the picture it gives of
French affairs in the reign of Charles le Fou is vivid
and excellent. There is something of a fatigued bre-
vity about it; and some portions are too uneventful
and unimportant to fit in greatly with the rest. The
catastrophe, however, is splendid ; and the Duke of
Orleans, as well as the villain of the piece, the Bas-
tard of Montargis, are portraits fully worthy of the
artist's fine portrait gallery.
Sir Henry Taylor's relationship to the dramatists
of the Elizabethan period is of much the same nature
as Mr. Horne's, -evident, not by any minute and
laboured imitation such as would betray weakness or
lack of originality, but by an adherence to the incom-
parable dramatic method of those men, to their tra-
ditions of feudal pageant and large action, and to
something of their pleasing magniloquence. And yet
our two contemporary Elizabethans are as different
in many essential matters as two artists can be. In
Mr. Horne's plays there is a fiery impetuosity that
we never meet with in Sir Henry Taylor's, where,
however, it is replaced by a sustained calmness of
power in shaping actions largely and truly. In Sir
Henry Taylor's we note the excellent faculty of wait-
ing and controlling and remodelling and binding,
carried to results of remarkable completeness: in
Mr. Horne’s we note the opposite faculty of rushing
mentally through an action, throwing it into a great
HENRY TAYLOR.
465
shape with impetuous rapidity, and then leaving the
result in a state satisfying enough to the reader, but
which fails by a long way to satisfy the author on
calm revision; and thus it is that in three of his best
works, some of the best things have been published
subsequently to the first issue. In Sir Henry Tay-
lor's plays there is often a little too much good ma-
terial, if anything. In Mr. Horne's there is often
not as much as one could wish, though there is never
any salient incompleteness. Sir Henry Taylor occa-
sionally overdoes to some extent that florid rhetoric
that marks much Elizabethan work; while Mr. Horne
never, except with a very clear and special artistic
purpose, becomes studiously and stiffly rhetorical
and often rises to a tense significance of expression
that is not found in the other works except on rare
occasions.
What we have most to thank Sir Henry Taylor
for is the large and statesmanlike intelligence with
which, in each of his five* historical plays, he has
studied and mastered a historical situation of no
mean significance, and the large and craftsmanlike
intelligence with which he has embodied the situa-
tion in each instance when mastered. He carries us
with him to the times and places of his plays and
sets us in the midst of stir and turbulence, shows us
(
* I am of course counting Philip as two, because it is not only
two plays but treats two distinct historical situations.
HE
466
OUR LIVING POETS.
individual life at struggle amid the throes of national
life, and gives us the supreme enjoyment that dra-
matists above all men can give us, of standing 'calm
and supercilious' among the lifelike movements of a
mimic world, to pass away at will out of its turmoil
and agony and bloodshed-keeping the pleasure and
the lessons and the knowledge, and leaving the pain
behind.
XVII.
GEORGE ELIOT.
The artist's part is both to be and do,
Transfixing with a special, central power
The flat experience of the common man,
And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,
Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing
He feels the inmost,-never felt the less
Because he sings it.'
E. B. BROWNING.
"The best singer is not the one who has the most lithe and
powerful organ ... the pleasure of poems is not in them that take
the handsomest measure and similes and sound. Without effort
and without exposing in the least how it is done the greatest poet
brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and
persons some more some less to bear on your individual character
as you hear or read. To do this well is to compete with the laws
that pursue and follow time.'-WALT WIIITMAN.
GEORGE ELIOT.
ALTHOUGH this volume is mainly devoted to the dis-
cussion of poetry, it is hardly necessary to crave
pardon for the following passages so far as they may
seem to diverge from the subject in hand and treat
of the totally distinct subject of modern fiction. On
the view here adopted the divergence is not such a
great one as it would seem at a hasty glance to be:
neither is it avoidable; for it is impossible to write a
book which shall approach to a complete treatment
of the subject of our living poets' without includ-
ing the name of George Eliot; and yet the title is ac-
corded to her here rather in consideration of her prose
works than of those that take poetic form. But even
supposing that none of the novels existed, it would
be the greatest affectation to leave unmentioned such
a work as The Spanish Gypsy (on a large scale) or as
Agatha (on a small scale).
There can be no doubt, if we consider the matter
closely, that the tenure upon which a supreme novelist
holds his fame is analogous to that on which the
poet's position is grounded, if not identical with it;
but the question is, How far is a novelist, at best,
470
OUR LIVING POETS.
to be regarded as a poet? since that designation is,
perhaps, the most coveted distinction humanity has
to confer. If the reader bear in mind the remarks
made in the Introduction, on the relative value of
idealisation and expression and on the distinctions
between the prose and poetic methods, he will pro-
bably not deem it a very lax liberality to use the term
'poet' in a somewhat larger sense than is usual, and
confer it on any novelist who should produce a work
abounding in those touches of well-marked sympathy
with all animate and inanimate nature, always obsery-
able in poets—a work not made up of literal scenic
transcripts from life tossed together, but composed of
parts of sufficiently modified relation to meet the exi-
gencies of striking beauty—a work in which the cha-
racters are sketched with sufficient idealising force to
make them real and vital—a work inculcating noble
views when didactic, and the whole expressed in style
at once individual, choice, and assimilative of such
of the elements of poetic style as can be utilised in
prose without affectation. A fine work in prose, too,
is eminently suited to the present day, and when pure
and noble is calculated to do more good to the average
English mind than an equally pure and noble work
in the poetic method, as distinguished by the attri-
bute of condensation. The most pregnant poems
frequently make a certain demand on the intellect,
which must be met before the heart can be effectually
1
IV
GEORGE ELIOT.
471
1
come at. But when the prose method is adopted, a
work is thoroughly self-explanatory; and though de-
licate artistic beauties continue to dawn freshly on
each fresh reading of a great book, we generally meet
with nothing that staggers even the simplest adult
intelligence. In an age characterised as this is by
hurry of business and strain of mind in every-day
life, this perspicuity in works of art is obviously a
great advantage, inasmuch as it readily meets the
demand of the overstrained mind for relaxation. The
average quality of modern fiction is so low, that a
splendid premium is held out to an author who should
take up this most popular form of art, and, without
administering irritants to the wide-spread and craving
ulcer of sensationalism, succeed in chaining the atten-
tion and winning the suffrages of the public by force
of true art. If the good, the beautiful, and the true,'
can be embodied in a prose work of art with wider
effect than in verse, the artist who, electing to address
the wider circle, attains supremacy, can hardly be
called upon to take rank second to any artist on the
mere ground that prose is not verse.
It would be invidious to say that, of contem-
porary English novelists, only one has attained to a
thoroughly high and noble ideal, and to a style at
once individual and greatly artistic; and yet, if asked
where to seek this combination of qualities, I should
be at a loss to know whither to turn unless to the
472
OUR LIVING POETS.
novels of George Eliot. The formation of this style
may be distinctly traced from her earliest works to
complete perfection. In the Scenes of Clerical Life
the language is decidedly elegant and superior: in
Adam Bede there is a marked increase of vigour, and
a superaddition of proper and comely ornament; but
it is in The Mill on the Floss that we first find the
perfect ease, grace, vigour, and propriety of ornament
which characterise the author's fully developed power.
In Silas Marner there is a certain large repose, attri-
butable to the subject rather than to any change of
style ; and in Romola the same great powers are
merely turned to another use in the supreme treat-
ment of an Italian Renaissance subject: there is no
radical change of style in Romola; nor is there in
Felix Holt, wherein the artist is again on the old
familiar English ground.
In broad contrast with the sensational school, the
novels of George Eliot are not dependent for their
interest on any flimsy effectism of plot, or on any
appeals to the morbid appetite for what is horrible
and unnatural. When we take up one of her books
we cannot possibly leave it unfinished; but this is
not because the chain of circumstances depicted is
of a complicated nature, pregnant with stimulus of
marvels, such as to awaken curiosity in regard to the
dénouement, or because any page is delightful read-
ing. The important point of attachment between the
11
UUC
GEORGE ELIOT.
473
writer and reader is in the fact that the characters
are so treated that we actually feel as if they were
beings present to our sense, and whom it were good
for us to see as far on their way as the artist permits
us. We never find ourselves stimulated to a base
thought or feeling towards any of the men and women
in these books, although George Eliot is keen in sar-
casm and satire, and paints a fair proportion of erring
characters and even criminals; and this state of the
reader's mind arises from the fact that the satire and
sarcasm are always genial, while the evil qualities of
the personages are placed in such surroundings of
circumstance and character, that pity is awakened
where hatred or contempt might have been called
forth by a less noble artist. The passing prosperity
of handsome scapegraces is never here seized on and
depicted as a stable thing: throughout these works
glooms the inexorable Nemesis, which all who diverge
from the path of strict rectitude create and preserve
for themselves. Never does the author lose the sense
of what should be eternally kept in mind — the fact
that an evil done cannot be undone, but leads to
innumerable unforeseen consequences—the fact best
expressed in her own epigram, Children may be
strangled-deeds never.' This Nemesis, too, is not
merely depicted as attendant on great crimes; but we
are constantly learning how terrible may be the con-
sequences of little lapses from the course of duty_
02
474
OUR LIVING POETS.
an idea which it is important to impress in art, inas-
much as life never affords sufficiently piquant exam-
ples, on account of the natural tendency of the mind
to forget what when it happens appears unimportant.
A profound and minute analyst of human nature,
with a keen objective perception of externals of scene
and action, she has, farther, a large faculty for phi-
losophising; and to bring these various qualities into
harmonious action, there is no more excellent vehicle
than the contemporary novel in its highest perfection
of structure and style. Again, her mind teems with
modern notions—is essentially a full-blown product
of the present century from a philosophic point of
view—as the novel compounded of dialogue, descrip-
tion, and analysis, presented in one clear medium of
idealised prose, is essentially a full-blown product of
the present century from an esthetic point of view.
The many great and noble lessons which George
Eliot directly inculcates at times, when her work is
didactic, are such as only the very thoughtful could
draw from observation of life, simply because the
circumstances to be deduced from are either very dif-
ficult of observation, or not adaptable for retention in
the average memory. But such is the power of this
artist that, when a character in one of her works does
a great thing, or gains a great victory over self, the
circumstance has a value as far transcending the
value of mere precept as that of real example does;
GEORGE ELIOT.
475
and a terrible consequence under her treatment con-
veys a warning as solemn and vivid as most of us
ever experience, and without the fearful disadvantage
of being too late. This could not be the case unless
the characters and scenes were made perfectly real
complete and all alive;' and again completeness and
life are results which can only be attained by perfect
mastery over the method of depicting. It is thus
evident, without any detailed criticism of her works,
that George Eliot has a special and decided faculty
for the prose method of expression: this faculty de-
tracts no jot from the poetry of her novels, but, with
years of nobly honest art-labour, has been developed
into a perfection of utterance impossible to improve
upon.
To all who prized her novels at this high rate
there was discomfort in the idea that she would one
day take to the poetic or dramatic walk of literature
- an idea broached some years ago in an article
written àpropos of the publication of Felix Holt, and
on the correct assumption that the fragments of verse
at the heads of various chapters of that book were by
the author. The idea was uncomfortable simply on
account of the immense difficulty which artists have
ever betrayed in effecting radical changes of method
when once thoroughly perfect in the practice of any
one mode or method of art. We hardly know of a
single instance of an artist who attained the goal of
476
OUR LIVING POETS.
1
perfection in more walks of art than one. "What of
Raphael's sonnets, Dante's picture ?' Truly we have
not either to canvass for an answer to the question.
But we have Raphael's sculpture; and what is it when
compared with Michelangelo's, or with the pictorial
produce of his own vast genius?
Had there been anything tentative or imperfect
about the prose writings of George Eliot, the possi-
bility of a change of method need have had no ter-
rors; but there were her works facing us, compact
and perfect. Prose had done what prose could-and
not mean are its possibilities—to yield us works of
high art, full of strength, beauty, nobleness, and
vitality, and showing an inherency of faculty as well
defined and as minutely elaborated in practice as is
the case in the works of great poets. Looking at
this fact, the suggestion that the splendid and capa-
cious vehicle for great thoughts and feelings and
large delineations might be at some time or other
cast aside, could not be admitted without bringing in
its train ugly dreams of the failure of other artists to
change after attaining perfection.
Much of George Eliot's prose writing is kept just
on the verge of verse, at the extreme pitch of poetry
in prose; and this is perhaps one of her greatest
merits in workmanship. To one with a complete
command of language the mere transit from prose to
blank verse presents no difficulty, but is often a
GEORGE ELIOT.
477
relief; and the great feat, when under the excite-
ment of working prose artistically, is to keep it true
to prose principles without betraying any effort. The
best artistic prose for passages where the theme de-
mands fervour is that which, without being actually
rhythmic, like many of Mr. Swinburne's choice pass-
ages, has a sufficiently obvious muscular undulation
to show that the writer was keeping a metrical im-
pulse well in hand when he wrote it. Direct and
marked rhythm in prose is an annoyance if persisted
in; but it is impossible for an artist in words not to
have the craving for rhythm. There is no art with-
out enthusiasm, and enthusiasm in language is very
liable to run into verse. Nevertheless, the writer of
high fiction who aims highest will rigidly curb any
fervour that would lead him close enough to the
channels of verse to give an inevitable direction of his
phrases into them. Now George Eliot's prose shows
not only the faculty to become metrical—that were a
small thing—but also a lofty reticence of metre, which
is one of the most exalted qualities of her style from
a technical point of view; and this quality, far from
pointing to poetry strictly so called as her legitimate
work, merely indicates her supreme ability to write
high prose, or, as it might well be termed, poetry in
prose.
The latter-day movement made in the scientific
world towards the perfection of the science of psy-
A
478
OUR LIVING POETS.
chology has been accompanied by a movement in the
artistic world twofold in its manifestation—the elab-
oration of the psychological school of poetry, and the
formation of the analytical school of prose fiction.
The imperfection of the works of this school taken
as a whole is a matter of course; but the mind of
George Eliot would seem to be such as to have ren-
dered her peculiarly fit to give the movement an irre-
sistible leadership in its prose manifestation. Into
that path of the twofold movement she stepped, and
became facile princeps; and it was this peculiar and
marked adaptation of a special mind to a special
work that excited misgivings as to the results of any
deviation from that path towards the other. Close
as are the two paths, the barriers between them are
strong and high, and the strongest runner is almost
sure to lose force in attempting to overleap them.
For doubtless all true artists grow up with some
strong and special bent, demanding only fitness of
circumstance to develop it into a full-blown faculty
or power; and this is all that is implied when one
says of a man that he is born a painter' or 'born a
poet.' To one who can be supreme in any one
manner of art, it is failure to fall short of supremacy
in another; and assuredly perfection in one direction
is hardly too little for the occupation of one mind
and life. The work of a great mind must always be
a great work; and, whatever method of expression à
GEORGE ELIOT.
479
true artist may adopt, competent judges are sure to
be able to detect the greatness of his ideal, even when
he has abandoned the form of expression natural to
him, and adopted one unfamiliar. But in order that
a work of art may be beneficial in a degree corre-
sponding with the greatness of the mind conceiving
it, it must be executed in entire conformity with
beauty,--as it is not likely to be if the artist steps
out of his usual sphere to compass the embodiment
of his concept. It must be remembered that it is
only the specially-studious few who analyse works of
art, and hold with themselves esthetic discussions.
But the unreflective many are keenly alive to the in-
fluences of supreme beauty; and the greater number
of those in whom a work of art bears fruit, uncon-
sciously assimilate truth and purity while drinking
in this external beauty, so difficult to produce in an
alien method, and the love of which is, next to the
love of human beings, the most refining of human
influences.
In the charming headings to the chapters of Felix
Holt it seemed as though the strong hand which
had, up to that point, exercised masterly control over
the restive tendency of high prose to rear up into
verse, had relaxed itself just for the sake of a holi-
day, and no more. These headings did not bear the
stamp of original poetry upon them. Forcible as
were some, and admirable in thought and applica-
Vuu
480
OUR LIVING POETS.
bility to the respective chapters as were all, none
bore traces of that clearly-defined individuality of
style betrayed by all great and accomplished prac-
titioners of verse, in even so small a compass as these
headings. Some of them possess the great distinctive
technical mark of poetry, condensation ; but this very
condensation is compassed not in an original and
individual method, but in the method of some pre-
existent model; and it is hardly necessary to enforce
that power of assimilation or reproduction, however
large, is no infallible index of self-existent poetic
faculty. In the Felix Holt headings are to be found
lines which might easily pass for Shakespeare's, as
in the slip of dialogue over chapter v.:
1st Citizen. Sir, there's a hurry in the veins of youth
That makes a vice of virtue by excess.
2d Citizen. What if the coolness of our tardier veins
Be loss of virtue?
1st Citizen.
All things cool with time-
The sun itself, they say, till heat shall find
A general level, nowhere in excess.
2d Citizen. 'Tis a poor climax, to my weaker thought,
That future middlingness.'
Here there is just that solid, thoughtful undercur-
rent to a racy exterior that makes so much of Shake-
speare's sparkling dialogue memorable as well as
pleasurable, imparting to it the quality which serves
to relegate to the world of proverbs so much of his
that is dashing and rapid. And passages of this
stamp by George Eliot are valued not for the excel-
GEORGE ELIOT.
481
lence of the assimilation to Shakespearian expression,
but for the pregnancy of the thought. At the head
of chapter xvii. is a piece of epigrammatic writing as
well packed with significance as a cutting from Hudi-
bras, and in the same metre; but in this, again, we
get no earnest of marked poetic faculty:
"It is good and soothfast saw;
Half-roasted never will be raw;
No dough is dried once more to meal,
No crock new-shapen by the wheel;
You can't turn curds to milk again,
Nor Now, by wishing, back to Then;
And having tasted stolen honey,
You can't buy innocence for money.'
Y CY
Various names arise to our lips as we skim along the
heads of the chapters, and always good names. On
one occasion (chapter iii.) the mild and thoughtful
face of Wordsworth in a delicious idyllic mood comes
before our eyes. Two or three times in flitting from
page to page you may get a powerful odour of the
manner of Mrs. Browning: one of these suggestions
is at chapter xiv., and another at chapter xlvi.;
and with regard to both these passages, it is easy to
imagine that any one turning over the leaves of Felix
Holt would speculate from what unfamiliar page of
Aurora Leigh these two choice morsels had been
culled. In one instance there is a marvel of assimila-
tive faculty, namely at chapter xxxiv. : the exquisite
manipulation of the five lines set there as motto
seem to suggest some fragment of speech dropped
II
482
OUR LIVING POETS.
from the mouth of an Enone grown gray in her wild
passion, and transferred from windy, many-fountained
Ida to some cold, colourless waste of land :
The fields are hoary with December's frost.
I too am boary with the chills of age.
But through the fields and through the untrodden woods
Is rest and stillness--only in my heart
The pall of winter shrouds & throbbing life.'
It is of course not intended to insinuate that
George Eliot has plagiarised the expressions of any
other poet; but in judging whether a poem is to be
regarded as truly and unmistakably poetic in expres-
sion, it is a good plan for a critic to bring together
such passages as are most striking; and, having
ranged them before him, he can decide whether in
his judgment they constitute a manner of expression
original as well as beautiful. This method of pro-
cedure seems to show in The Spanish Gypsy, as in
the Felix Holt mottoes, that such poetic style as the
author has developed has been the result of the un-
consciously assimilative faculty. Such is frequently
the case with writers of intense poetic feeling, whose
mode of expression is other than the poetic mode. A
happy thought comes, and is happily expressed; but
when analysed technically, it is found to be expressed
as A or B would have expressed it, had his mind been
the fortunate nursing-ground of the idea ;—not that
the actual possessor of the idea has borrowed a single
word from A or B, but that antecedent familiarity
-
GEORGE ELIOT.
483
(
with A's or B's work has stamped certain forms or
lines of speech on a mind which, if occupied by a
poetic equipment of its own, would not have assimi-
lated such lines or forms. And thus it is that we
meet in The Spanish Gypsy passages which, without
perhaps a definite resemblance to any special pass-
age by another poet, are so distinctly in a manner as-
sociated with some well-known name that, had we met
them as detached quotations, we should have said,
* Tennyson,' 'Shakespeare,' " Mrs. Browning, 'Shel-
ley,' as the case might be. Who, for instance, would
not take these exquisite lines for the product of the
Laureate's mind ?-
Through all her frame there ran the shock
Of some sharp-wounding joy, like his who hastes
And dreads to come too late, and comes in time .
To press a loved hand dying.'
Not only does the ring of the words recall Tennyson,
but there is that Tennysonian structure which gives
an inevitable rhythmic flow, divide the words into
lines how you will. Write the passage thus
Through all her frame
There ran the shock of some sharp-wounding joy,
Like his who hastes and dreads to come too late,
And comes in time to press a loved hand dying'—
and you get scansion as distinct and pure as before,
though not quite so stately. The names most fre-
quently forced on the mind in connection with mat-
ters of expression in The Spanish Gypsy are, how-
484
OUR LIVING POETS.
ever, Shakespeare and Mrs. Browning. The following
lines are peculiarly suggestive of the great poetess :
all deities,
Thronging Olympus in fine attitudes;
Or all hell's heroes whom the poet saw
Tremble like lions, writhe like demigods.'
And when we read further on-
One pulse of Time makes the base hollow,-sends
The towering certainty we built so high
Toppling in fragments meaningless,'
we are forced by identity of metaphor to revert to
some lines in Aurora Leigh, describing Romney (in
far less elegant terms, truly) as a man who
"builds his goodness up
So high, it topples down to the other side
And makes a sort of badness.'
100
Even Milton is not unrepresented, as witness the
line · When with obliquely soaring bend altern;' and
of Shakespearian cuttings from this poem, by one of
the most Shakespearian of modern authors, it would
be easy to give a long array; but I must desist.
An appraisal of the lyrics of The Spanish Gypsy
yields a result similar to that obtained by examining
the scattered passages of pointed beauty—that is to
say, the songs do not support a claim to self-suf-
ficiency in the matter of lyrical expression : charm-
ingly thoughtful as are many of the songs of this
volume, hardly any come up to the standard of lyrical
excellence which we should demand of a new poet as
GEORGE ELIOT.
485
à diploma-condition. All are easy and graceful in
expression ; but there is more accomplishment than
fire in them: they do not, like the songs of The
Princess, or some of the smaller pieces of Browning,
or, above all, the lyrical portions of Shelley's Pro-
metheus, fix themselves upon us with that irresistible
ring that keeps up a stream of unconscious music in
the mind, which we find breaking out from time to
time in some snatch of verse, coming suddenly to our
lips without, perhaps, our knowing or caring whence.
And in lyrical poetry, this musical importunity is a
quality which we expect to meet with.
As great stress was laid, in my introduction, on
the polarising of language as an element of poetic
style, it may naturally be asked what, in that re-
spect, is elicited by searching the pages of The Span-
ish Gypsy. To tell the truth, I have only discovered
two instances in which any use has been made of
this instrument of the poet. In one case, Don Silya
is described as "too proudly special for obedience-
a happy term wherein the force of the word special
exceeds by a degree its usual value. In the other
case, Prior Isidor, reproaching Don Silva, exclaims-
O fallen knighthood, penitent of high vows !!
Here, the word penitent is placed in such unusual
company as to convey an intensified sarcasm highly
artistic in its propriety under the circumstances of
the dialogue, throughout which the Prior has been
.
486
OUR LIVING POETS.
working himself up to a higher and higher pitch of
bitter invective.
It would be absurd to say that The Spanish Gypsy
is devoid of individualities of expression such as would
help to make up a style. Indeed there are nume-
rous minutiæ of utterance, scattered throughout it,
which are unmistakably born and bred in the most
original recesses of this most original mind. But
while such happy thoughts as that 'vicious crawl-
ing things are pretty eggs' in 'love's spring,' or
that 'small legs and arms with pleasant agitation
purposeless go up and down like pretty fruits in
gales,'—such comparisons as that of little Pepe's
'small Semitic nose' to 'a new-born minnow,'-are
individual and pointed, and would show well in the
excellent setting of a page of George Eliot's high
prose, they have scarcely sufficient intensity to grace
the more exacting setting of verse; and indeed they
are a little below the dignity blank verse assumes
with its inexpressible afflatus—the inevitable accom-
paniment of any serious attempt at poetry strictly so
called. In the greater part of the work this afflatus
itself is lacking: there often seems to be no good
reason why the matter in hand should have been
divided into lines rather than into paragraphs; and
indeed it is not at all clear that many passages would
not gain force by being presented in a prose para-
graph; inasmuch as the words are often not con-
GEORGE ELIOT.
487
densed into blank verse, but simply distributed in that
form. They fall fluently and perspicuously into iam-
bic lines; but the great majority of these lines have
not light and shade, and points of special interest as
regards structure, to justify their existence as sepa-
rate individuals rather than in the commonwealth of
a paragraph. The absence of condensation in any
passage may be readily tested by the interpolation of
half-a-dozen insignificant words, with the view of eli-
minating the rhythmic sequence; and on the plea of
experiment one may perhaps venture to print a passage
in a paragraph with the interpolated words required
for the abolition of metre marked by italics :
"Do you hear the trumpet? There is old Ramon's blast. No
bray but his can shake the air so well. He takes his trumpeting
as solemnly as an angel charged to wake the dead; thinks war
was made for trumpeters, and that their great art was made solely
for themselves who understand it. His features all have shaped
themselves to blowing, and when his trumpet is either bagged or
left at home he seems like a chattel in a broker's booth, a spout-
less watering-can, a promise to pay no sum particular.'
Here we have merely inserted the six insignificant
words, do, an, that, was, either, and like, and twice
restored the i to is where the author had left an apos-
trophe to serve for it. Yet the passage would surely
be read by any one who saw it for the first time with-
out any suspicion that it merely required the excision
of six little words and two letters to transform it to
verse; no single expression betraying the secret that
the passage is from a poem. Now, for another ex-
488
OUR LIVING POETS.
periment, make a random cutting of equal length
from a work in the strictly poetic method, and take
precisely the same liberty with it that has been taken
here. Let it be from Browning, who has hardly
written any prose, and whose few attempts to struggle
out of the glorious bondage of verse have not been
greatly successful. Sordello shall furnish what is
wanted : here is the address to Shelley, from the
proem:
'I need not fear this audience, I make free with all of them,
but then this is no place for thee! The thunder-phrase of Æschy-
lus the Athenian, grown up out of his memories of Marathon, would
echo like his own sword's griding screech braying a Persian shield,
the silver speech of Sidney's self, the stairy paladin, would turn
intense as the blast of a trumpet sounding in the knights to tilt,
wert thou to hear! What heart have I to play my puppets, to
bear my part before these worthies ?'
Here it has been needful to interpolate nine words
before the form could be effectually ruined; but it
needs not that these be eliminated, and that the form
be restored, to show even any one who does not know
this, or any passage of Browning, that this is poetry.
The expressions thunder - phrase, griding screech,
braying (as applied to the stroke of a sword on a
shield), silver speech, starry paladin, and intense (as
here used), all speak for themselves, and all convey
an intensified music of sound, together with rich sug-
gestiveness of sense, not to name the pithy poetic
summary of the soldier-dramatist Æschylus.
The form of The Spanish Gypsy it is difficult to
GEORGE ELIOT.
489
O
regard as anything but a mistake. It may be a nar-
row view, but it seems to me that dramatic work, such
as the dialogues of this book, loses tone at once by the
introduction of blank-verse descriptions and reflections
woven closely into the fabric, and even by the ampli-
fication of prose stage-directions to the dimensions
they assume in The Spanish Gypsy. In the very best
scene (which, by the bye, is for the most part in
prose)—the scene wherein Juan is robbed by gypsy
girls of various articles of finery, and gets them back
by means of music—this feature of construction is
prominent, and one cannot but wish that so charming
a scene had been managed, as it easily might, with
far less of stage-direction. Condensed meaning might
have been gained, and perspicuity might have re-
mained unimpaired, by the elimination of a large frac-
tion of these directions, and the transference of ano-
ther fraction to the fabric of the dialogue.
To those who take a deep interest in the question
of George Eliot's becoming a distinguished poet as
well as prosateur, one of the most unsatisfactory
symptoms is the actual texture of the blank verse.
Large, easy, and unfaltering (though somewhat irre-
gular) in flow, rich and deep in colour, there is yet a
lack of make in the great bulk of the lines, that it is
most difficult to define and yet impossible not to feel.
In any fair average sample of the texture of the book,
the lines lack that tesselated exquisiteness of compo-
UL
490
OUR LIVING POETS.
sition which abounds in Tennyson, and is found in
two small passages of George Eliot's verse, already
quoted, and both remarkably Tennysonian.
To tell a tale in verse in the prose method is fatal
in one respect. Few authors have the temerity to
carry a work in verse to as great a length as a work
in prose; and in reducing to the necessary limits a
work in verse which is not thoroughly poetic in method
--not thoroughly condensed in expression the dan-
ger is that much will be left out which, if told out in
prose, would save the characters from the great fault
of shadowiness. Some such fatal error, I venture to
submit, attended the production of The Spanish
Gypsy, in which the characters are too vague, too
mere embodiments of noble thoughts and sentiments:
they do not take a living and active place in our minds
as do the Marners and Maggies, the Dodsons and
Tullivers, and all the persons of George Eliot's other
books. As we pass from page to page, we do not fail
to find thought piled on thought, speaking of one
atmosphere and one alone--the wide, free, exhilarat-
ing atmosphere of mind in which such favourite com-
panions of our solitude' as Nancy Lammeter, the
barber Nello, Mrs. Poyser, Bob Jakin, &c., all lived
and moved and had their being before they were sent
forth to live the larger life they have since entered
upon the wide life in a world's mind. But the new
people that we expect to meet when we take up a
GEORGE ELIOT.
491
11
work by George Eliot—where are they? What has
become of them when we close the book? We have
indeed one new friend whose presence we can feel,
and whose identity takes its place in the long ranks
of identities standing boldly out from the pages of
the six novels : we have indeed the vital, air-breath-
ing, heart-winning Juan; but where do the rest go?
They seem to troop past us like a graveyard host,
and leave on the mind merely the shadowy semblance
of a manhood extinguished on the eve of develop-
ment into a powerful instrument - a womanhood
crushed in the clash of jarring claims --a priesthood
suffering and making others suffer in the cause of
religion-another manhood lost in the weakness of
self-indulgence. Zarca, Fedalma, Isidor, Silva, do
not rest with us as other than vehicles for noble ideas
and exponents of noble sentiments: muscle and blood
are lacking in the tale of their endowments : they all
seem more or less afflicted with that anemia which
inevitably arises from a mistaken method a method
in which the artist is not sufficiently at home to pro-
duce live men and women in it. Juan has more actual
prose in his treatment than the rest have; and in
his speeches, as well as in the descriptive passages
relating to him, there is far more appearance than
elsewhere of the old manner of speech, even though
meted out into blank verse. Juan certainly lives
distinctly before us, and better recalls the dramatic
1
2
492
OUR LIVING POETS.
N
breadth of Shakespeare than anything in the book.
Whatever he says is thoroughly characteristic: his
various figurings before us furnish a homogeneous
series of aspects which make up an evident man-
and that a very noble one. His nobility consists
chiefly in a pure and disinterested devotion to Fe-
dalma, and a genial kindliness to every one, together
with a cheerful acceptance of the position in life
which places him out of all possibility of reward
for his devotedness. The book is evidently framed
with a view to being as unsuitable for the stage as
possible: interspersed as the dialogues are with
analytical and descriptive passages spoken in the
author's own person, the work would lose an in-
dispensable tithe of its significance if played merely
as the characters speak for themselves in its pages;
and it would require dramatising in the same de-
gree and in the same sense as an ordinary novel re-
quires to have that operation performed to fit it for
stage purposes. It is very intelligible that an artist
of a high class should wish to avoid the remote con-
tingency of being made to figure on a degenerate
stage such as ours. Still, the drama and the stage
are subjectively so intimate in relationship, that a
fine drama is usually found to meet the exigencies of
the stage. So with Juan--the scenes in which he is
introduced are not only fuller of dramatic portraiture,
but also more instinct with dramatic life, and that
GEORGE ELIOT.
493
most difficult thing to treat in the drama, motion.
Take, for instance, the beautiful scene among the
gypsies, already referred to: how full it is of motion,
as well as deep thought and exquisite portraiture.
Except for the uncomfortableness involved in the
copious stage-directions, the scene may be compared
with the great episode of the “Rainbow' tavern in
Silas Marner, to which it is equal in idealising force,
though not in variety of character. It would be of
great experimental interest to ascertain with how
little verbal and structural alteration this scene of
Juan and the gypsies might be reduced to the pure
prose perfection of the Rainbow scene, and what
would be the extent of the converse modification in
reducing the “Rainbow episode to a scene on the
other model.
The Spanish Gypsy is as full of epigrammatic
point and splendour as the novels; nor is it a whit
behind them in wealth of short passages to be laid
away in the mind's treasure-house, and kept for use
as well as pleasure. Here are four pregnant lines,
for instance :
Conscience is harder than our enemies,
Knows more, accuses with more nicety,
Nor needs to question Rumour if we fall
Below the perfect model of our thought.'
Again, we may go a very long journey through liter-
ature without lighting on such a thought as this:
494
POETS.
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OUR LIVING A
'Nay, never falter : no great deed is done
By falterers who ask for certainty.
No good is certain, but the steadfast mind,
The undivided will to seek the good :
'Tis that compels the elements, and wrings
A human music from the indifferent air.
The greatest gift the hero leaves his race
Is to have been a hero. Say we fail!
We feed the high tradition of the world...'
The plot of the book affords what George Eliot
always takes care to find-ample material for the set-
ting forth of the inexorable weight of antecedent cir-
cumstance, and for the inculcation of the great duty
of self-renunciation. Fedalma sacrifices herself un-
complainingly because convinced, like Maggy Tul-
liver, that her path of duty lies in self-sacrifice. Silva,
on the contrary, is unablė to submit to the large
march of circumstance, and, in his ineffectual strug-
gle to assert his own life, mars the great project of
a great soul, flings off his own high responsibilities,
and, by his inability to carry out the lower part he
has chosen, sets aside the possibility of consummat-
ing his desires even at the sacrifice he has elected to
make. The philosophical resources of the plot are
made use of to the utmost. The amount of discus-
sion which finds utterance in the poem, equally with
the valuable analyses of mental phenomena, are no-
thing less than startling. The highest poetical quali-
ties George Eliot has not before failed of reaching-
those qualities summed up under the head of ideali-
sation-she has here grasped with a hand strong as
GEORGE ELIOT.
495
I
ever. But it is the seeker after the technical beauties
of poetry who, when he comes to these pages, is not
satisfied in a degree nearly approaching that in which
the seeker for the technical beauties of high prose is
satisfied in her former works. To students and those
who have assimilated the code of morality implied in
George Eliot's works, this production must ever be
dear for intimate companionship, as affording innu-
merable new renderings of the great sentiments of
the author; but by the dilettante and the stickler for
unity of form, it will never probably be greatly loved.
It is, of course, not desired to erect popularity as the
final criterion of excellence in judging of a work of
art of such high feeling and subtle intellectuality;
but we may safely say that, had the subject been
treated in prose, a large and intelligent class of
readers now unappealed to would have come readily
within the influence of the work.
It is of course not beyond hope that we may yet
get novels from George Eliot, although the fact that
all she has published since Felix Holt* has been in
verse argues against such a hope. Of the three
smaller poems How Lisa Loved the King, Agatha,
and The Legend of Jubal, there is not a great deal to
say. The first is a story from Boccaccio, versified
in a style that has less attraction than much of the
poetry we had already had from the author, while the
* Except the 'Address to Working Men.'
496
OUR LIVING POETS.
Legend, exceedingly original and splendid in thought,
and full of beautiful passages, suggested a new in-
fluence in method—that of Mr. Morris : the line,
And that no night was ever like this night
would have passed very well for a line of Jason or
The Earthly Paradise. Agatha takes a different stand-
ing: it is far finer in form than any poem by the same
hand-much more nearly approaches perfection. As
it is but little known here, having been published in
an American magazine (the Atlantic Monthly), a few
words about it may fitly close this essay. It is
matter for regret that it is not better known in Eng-
land, for, like other works of the author, it is full of
a particular broad thoughtfulness which no head but
one could have embodied in a work of literary art.
It is in form a sketch of nature and life from the
Black Forest district. We are invited, in the prelude,
to accompany the poet-
'to the mountain, not where rocks
Soar harsh above the troops of hurrying pines,
But where the earth spreads soft and rounded breasts
To feed her children;"
and we are then introduced to the lowly cottage where
poor old Agatha, the helpful hand-maiden of fellow-
villagers in general, lives and gives a home to two
poorer cousins. The interior of this cottage being
placed before us with a Dutch perfection of detail,
whereof the precise analogue is to be found almost
GEORGE ELIOT.
497
anywhere in the novels of George Eliot, but not else-
where, the Countess Linda is presented to us—a young
countess who comes to visit the old maid : then
follows a dialogue, of beautiful simplicity, which is
yet full of noble thought, skilfully placed for the most
part in the mouth of the simple old woman. In
sketching the outer and inner life of an aged maiden,
typical, like Agatha, of a large class, the artist but
follows that delicate and lofty instinct which has led
her once and again to aggrandise and 'prove illus-
trious' all life that is pure, even though lowly, and
all work that is nobly done, however ignoble the in-
trinsic quality; but in this poem there is yet more;
for the religion of the peasantry is woven with a
dainty though firm hand into the fabric of the whole
piece; and we are made to feel, as we have been more
recently by the descriptions of the Ober-Ammergau
Passion Play, how vital the medieval form of faith
still is among certain contemporaries, who adhere
closely and in all simple-mindedness, not to its gor-
geous ritual and its elaborate dogmas, but to all the
most human of its traits. The completeness with
which a broad and lofty intelligence, holding all great
ideas in full light, and comprehending the essences
of religions, can sink itself so as to find the terms
wherein such and such grand facts and thoughts
would suggest themselves to a soul of primitive sim-
plicity, is strikingly exemplified in several passages
KK
498
OUR LIVING POETS.
of this poem, and notably in Agatha's description of
the effect a certain pilgrimage had in enlarging her
idea of antecedent time :
The time! the time! It never seemed far back,
Only to father's father and his kin
That lived before him. But the time stretched out
After that pilgrimage : I seemed to see
Far back, and yet I knew time lay behind,
As there are countries lying still behind
The highest mountains, there in Switzerland.
0, it is great to go on pilgrimage!'
The same tender care for Christian legend and his-
tory which the artist shows, in her prelude, in re-
calling the sweet story of the Magdalen, comparing
Countess Linda's hair to
'hers who made the wavy lengths once speak
The grateful worship of a rescued soul,'
is shown also in the dialogue in various Catholic
ideas, well selected for their humanness from among
the multiplicity, and again in a lyric which closes
the piece, and is described as a song growing from
out the life of the peasantry. Agatha's reasons for
and against praying are very characteristic:
Oft I think my prayers
Are foolish, feeble things; for Christ is good
Whether I pray or not, -the Virgin's heart
Is kinder far than mine; and then I stop
And feel I can do naught towards helping men,
Till out it comes, like tears that will not hold,
And I must pray again for all the world.';
And almost more beautiful is the simple aspiration
GEORGE ELIOT.
499
and trust of her reply to the Countess's doubt whether
the poor old lady's sins can be very heavy-
Nay, but they may be greater than I know;
'Tis but dim light I see by. So I try
All ways I know of to be cleansed and pure.
I would not sink where evil spirits are.
There's perfect goodness somewhere: so I strive.'
But the piece rises to van artistic climax in the
terminal song, whose burden of 'quaintly mingled
mirth and piety' is spread over its ten stanzas
with perfect grace, covering much profound thought.
Through all its choric out-breathings to saints, this
song shows that power which George Eliot possesses
in so exceptional a measure, to grasp the essentially
human element of an idea; and whether we read-
"Holy Babe, our God and Brother,
Bind vs fast to one another!'
Or,
"Good Saint Joseph, faithful spouse,
Help us all to keep our vows!'-
the same thought will assert itself that the old faith
remains vital yet, by virtue of its human essences,
among men and women who have had no opportunity
to climb to a higher, more intellectually founded, and
more demonstrable form of religion. Such attempts
as that so successfully made in this little poem-to
present acceptably to all classes pictures of living be-
lief-active, and active for good in the life of the
individual—are no new thing to George Eliot, but are
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OUR LIVING POETS.
among the great beauties of her other works in the
opinion of those who think as well as enjoy. Such
attempts lie beyond the limits of weak contemporary
praise, and to speak worthily of them is the heritage
of a later generation.
APPENDIX.
JOHN PAYNE AND ARTHUR W. E. O'SHAUGHNESSY.
APPENDIX.
It would be strange if, in the time it must of necessity take
to complete an essay on so wide a subject as that of the
present volume, the weekly group of new books of verse
had included nothing of equal value to much that is herein
discussed. If it had been practicable to extend the scheme
of my essay considerably at a late stage, I should have
liked to examine at length the works of at least four gen-
tlemen whose names have come before the public only of
late—Mr. Payne, Mr. O'Shaughnessy, Dr. Hake, and Mr.
K. R. Cooke; and it is likely that there is a good deal of
verse issued by others that one might wish to search for
promises of future work, if only one could read all that is
put forth in the way of poetry. As matters stand, I shall
not be able to do more than make a few remarks on the
work of Mr. Payne and Mr. O'Shaughnessy, as being, of
recent poetry, that which seems to hold both the greatest
promise and the clearest evidence of attachment to the
current poetic literature; and on this head I cannot do
more than note that Mr. Payne's poetry seems to succeed
especially to that of Mr. Morris, and Mr. O'Shaughnessy's
to that of Mr. Swinburne. Mr. Cooke, with a true poetic
gift, is altogether too immature in his verse for one to
build firm hopes on him; while Dr. Hake, a genuine and
very remarkable poet, seems like one who has somehow
descended from a former generation of poets, ready accou-
504
OUR LIVING POETS.
tred from their traditions, and without any strong affini-
ties with the present generations.
Of the four poems in Mr. Payne's first instalment of a
work to be called The House of Dreams, that which stands
first and gives a name to the volume is by far the least
estimable, and serves best to define the gulph that exists
between the author's present works and those of the in-
comparable "dreamer of dreams' whose style and manner
seem to have influenced him. Mr. Morris, as we have
seen, dreams his dreams with a distinctly human solidity
and interest, and with an absolute command over romantic
method: Mr. Payne warns his readers at the outset that
whoso is fain to enter in this shadow-land' of his must
forget ‘all the daylight ways of hand and brain; and as re-
gards the large bulk of his work the warning is timely and
well-founded. In nearly all he has published one notes
a lack of that material human interest essential for an en-
during poetry: he takes pains to build, with oriental gorge-
ousness of fancy, airy visions that do not dwell in the mind,
but pass away, leaving the vague sense of diffuse verbiage
and phantasmic glare of undefined colour; and, although
there is much sweet and tender landscape work, the sense
of the dreamy and impalpable predominates in the long
run over the sense of the real and tangible and healthful.
These things are more markedly so in The Masque of Sha-
dows than in any poem: it shows, as all Mr. Payne's poetry
does, a quick and vivid imagination, but one that seems to
be uncontrolled at present by any firmness of judgment
sufficient to keep it in wholesome regions; the great part
of these fanciful imaginings are of the bootless order ;-
they bear upon nothing beyond an abnormal love of the
gorgeous and fantastic, and do not, except at rare intervals,
APPENDIX.
505
show sympathy with men and their passions and doings.
The Rime of Redemption is a noteworthy exception to
these general conditions of Mr. Payne's work: it is a real
contribution to the poetry of the day, and has a very
noble thought for basework. Written in the manner of
The Ancient Mariner, it tells the tale of a knight whose
conquering love' prevails to save the soul of
the maid the past years laid
Upon his breast to sleep,
Long dead in sin, laid low within
The grave unblest and deep’-
. and very finely carried out is the idea of his brooding
over her untimely fate till he rises, determined to save her
soul, even at the expense of his own, and meets her ghost
in the moonlight, to speed forth on a weird ride in quest
of 'Redemption. This is the only one of these poems
that falls compactly into a vital and inevitable form, suffi-
cient to stamp it as a work of genius. The knight and the
maid are hurried with splendid vigour through the four
stages of their ghostly ride, halting at "fairy-land,' purga-
tory, heaven and hell; at each of the first three the knight
is offered admittance, but refuses any good for himself that
cannot be shared by her; and when, at the fourth halting-
place, he is given the alternative of going back without
her or entering to burn for ever with her, he chooses hell.
Of course the end is the disappearance of hell and the
maid, and the apparition of a vision, whereby he knew
his love prevail'd above judgment and destiny.' No space
is lost here in bootless imaginings: all is occupied by the
urgent and fiery action; and as a piece of vigorous impetu-
ous ballad-verse it recalls the might of hand shown in
The Ancient Mariner and something of the large rush of
Bürger's Lenore. In its degree, the verse :
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OUR LIVING POETS.
• The cloudwrack grey did break away,
Out shone the ghostly moon ;
Down slid the haze from off the ways
Before her silver shoon'-
is graphic in the same great way as Coleridge's
The sun's rim dips; the stars rush out;
At one stride comes the dark'-
and the two following stanzas are simply magnificent:
The wind screams past; they ride so fast,-
Like troops of souls in pain
The snowdrifts spin, but none may win
To rest upon the twain.
So fast they ride, the blasts divide
To let them hurry on;
The wandering ghosts troop past in hosts
Across the moonlight wan.'
In The Building of the Dream one has to note the
same vagueness and diffuseness already spoken of: the
poem is a great deal too long and visionary for any mood
in these earnest days, save some listless, seaside, summer-
noon mood; but the end is another admirably human ex-
ception to the poet's usual conditions : the hero, who had
searched all his life for some means whereby to realise the
dreams of his youth, and has discovered, by virtue of an
old Greek recipe, the Earthly Paradise, finds the intense
life of pleasure too much for his human weakness, and
comes away from his ideal dream-queen to die among mere
men. This is narrated with great pathos.
It is in a studied archaïsm of language and a love of
old romance that one traces an analogy between Mr. Payne
and Mr. Morris; but the wide difference indicated between
Mr. Morris's romantic reality and Mr. Payne's romantic
dreaminess is no wider than that between the language
employed by the two poets. Mr. Morris's language is
APPENDIX
507
natural and easy and direct, and above all things pure :
Mr. Payne's strikes one as affected, and is certainly often
involved and very far from pure; for frequently, when
studied imitation of Chaucer is most palpable, one meets
with some word of an entirely modern order; and indeed
there is a wearisome frequency of long words, obsolete
words, and unpleasantly quaint words.
Mr. Payne's book of sonnets, miscalled Intaglios, is
disappointing. The sonnet set by way of inscription in
front of the other book is very beautiful : it is quite as
worthy of the name Intaglio as some of M. Gautier's
pieces are to be called Cameos, and it gave hope that Mr.
Payne might really write fine sonnets, notwithstanding
the radical opposition between his romantic faculty and
the faculty of sonnet-making. But there are not above
two or three sonnets in the volume that have sufficient
incisiveness, clearness of cut, and perfectness of finish to
succeed by comparison to the title of Intaglio. In the in-
scription sonnet there is one fault,—the mistake of not
making the sense pause at the end of the second quatrain,
and of letting it pause witli the first line of the sestett—so
as to overbuild the quatrains and break the sestett. This
mistake might have been accidental in the one instance;
but on turning to the volume of so-called Intaglios, we
find the practice systematically adopted. This heresy is
too important to be left unnoticed : it is simple ruin in a
series of sonnets, though pardonable as an isolated varia-
tion. But beside this the sonnets have seldom any suffi-
cient clearness and completeness of thought, or tenseness
and crispness of phrase, for compositions in this form.
Mr. O'Shaughnessy's poetry is not really much more
mature than Mr. Payne's is; but while Mr. Payne's,
508
OUR LIVING POETS.
being for the most part shadowy and inexpressive of real
life, shows its immaturity more particularly in style and
method, Mr. O'Shaughnessy's, with a far less youthful
style and method, shows youthfulness in expressing real
life,--sometimes faintly enough, but at other times only
too strongly. I say too strongly because the most vigor-
ously expressed views of life to be found in this poet's
book are restricted, and therefore relatively false if not
positively false. There is not here any of the rampant
viciousness we have seen in some recent poetry, but rather
what should seem to be an accidental cynicism, sure to
pass away with a few years of work as noble in manner as
Mr. O'Shaughnessy promises to do. It seems almost a
matter of course that a young poet of a highly ideal and
sensuous tendency should feel something of a bitter isola-
tion in these days of realistic and colourless outward ex-
istence; and therefore one would not find much fault
with Mr. O'Shaughnessy for introducing himself to his
readers as an exile walking among mere men, with the
arrogant leniency set forth in such verses as these :-
A common folk I walk among;
I speak dull things in their own tongue:
But all the while within I hear
A song I do not sing for fear
How sweet, how different a thing!
And when I come where none are near
I open all my heart and sing. ...
I go with them; and in their sight
I would not scorn their little light,
Nor mock the things they hold divine;
But when I kneel before the shrine
Of some base deity of theirs,
I pray all inwardly to mine,
And send my soul up with my prayers.'
There is in such verses as these so much exquisiteness
APPENDIX
509
of lyric instinct that common folk’ can smile, and par-
don the author for being a little unduly preoccupied with
the knowledge that he has a poetic mission among prosaic
people; and such common folk as have common-sense
do not expect him, in a first book, to be duly preoccupied
with the knowledge that a poet is a poet, in the full
sense, just in proportion as he can yield himself to the
idealisation and beautifying of all that is dearest in the
inmost heart of the average man and woman of his time.
In like manner, it is not surprising that one who shows
so delicate a sense of material beauty should have been
overwhelmed by the consideration that so many of the
traditional queens of beauty did very little good in the
world, and a great deal of harm. Some day, perhaps,
Mr. O'Shaughnessy will give us splendid poetry, showing
a sense that woman's fairness is no such baneful thing
when its influences are judged justly and widely; but at
present we may accept the poems of the so-called Epic of
Women with a keen sense of the extraordinary strength
and directness they own as first lyric qualities, and with-
out any fierce repugnance towards the cynical slur they
cast on womankind. This collection of poems opens with
a comical account of God's creation of woman,---beau-
tifully told, however comical, and concluding with the
explanatory generalisation:
"He feasted her with ease and idle food
Of gods, and taught her lusts to fill the whole
Of life; withal He gave her nothing good,
And left her as He made her—without soul.
And lo, when He had held her for a season
In His own pleasure-palaces above,
He gave her unto man; this is the reason
She is so fair to see, so false to love.'
510
POETS.
1
OUR LIVING And then we have put before us, in independent nar-
rations, the evil doings of Aphrodite, Cleopatra, Salome,
and Helen, and finally, in a very curious monologue, the
wickedness and sudden death of some unspecified woman
of comparative modernness. There is no organic connec-
tion between these poems beyond the dominant note of
cynical censure; and there is no formal connection be-
yond the fact that all but two of them are written in
similar quatrains to those just quoted. The best of them,
The Daughter of Herodias, is in two admirable original
metres; and the final poem, A Troth for Eternity, is in
blank verse of a notably fine quality; but as a mono-
logue, wherein the speaker indicates an action in several
stages, it is decidedly objectionable on technical grounds:
the whole or almost the whole of it is necessarily thought
and not spoken, for throughout the speaker is analysing
his relations with a woman present at the time, and re-
iterating to the reader a secret that he could not possibly
divulge to her, namely that he means to stab her as soon
as she gets to sleep. One cannot possibly regard the
series as in any sense An Epic of Women, and it is there-
fore justifiable to select The Daughter of Herodias, and
record one's opinion that here is a work of sufficient beauty
and scope and truth to remove the author from the ranks
of mere scholar-poets, and give him at once the unquali-
fied standing of poet. It is a very fine idea here set forth,
that the measure of Salome's accursedness is to be to all
time in proportion to the divine beauty of the character
overthrown by her wiles; and there is nothing of like
breadth in any other of Mr. O'Shaughnessy's poems. The
Baptist's solitary life in the desert, among the footprints
of great elder prophets, is handled with much strength in
APPENDIX.
511
the earlier half of the poem: the two stanzas given below
seem to me to be truly grand:
* But he walked through the ancient wilderness.
O, there the prints of feet were numberless
And holy all about him! And quite plain
He saw each spot an angel silvershod
Had lit upon; where Jacob too had lain
The place seemed fresh,—and, bright and lately trod,
A long track showed were Enoch walked with God.
And often, while the sacred darkness trailed
Along the mountains smitted and unveiled
By rending lightnings,-over all the noise
Of thunders and the earth that quaked and bowed
From its foundations-he could hear the voice
Of great Elias prophesying loud
To Him whose face was covered by a cloud.'
And grander still are the passages telling how the un-
conscious natural things of the desert oppressed him with
the sense of his human impurity :
Yea, all the dumb things and the creatures there
Were grand, and some way sanctified; most fair
The very lions stood, and had no shame
Before the angels; and what time were poured
The floods of the Lord's anger forth, they came
Quite nigh the lightnings of the Mount and roared
Among the roaring thunders of the Lord:-
until all this strange innocence forces him to purify himself
by sharp discipline, and he feels impelled at length to
go forth straight
From God there in the desert, with the great
Unearthliness upon him, and adjure
The nations of the whole world with his voice.'
The exquisite sensuous beauty of Salome's dance, as con-
trasted in the latter half of the poem with the adjuration
of King Herod, is not less than masterly.
Of Mr. O'Shaughnessy's smaller poems the three most
pleasing are A Whisper from the Grave, The Fountain of
512
OUR LIVING POETS.
Tears, and The Spectre of the Past : these three are per-
fectly clear in their pathetic meaning, and notably excel-
lent in metric and rhythmic qualities. Indeed, as regards
the invention and use of metres the author is particularly
happy. Those of his own originating are at the same
time simple, musical, and individual; and it is not very
often that metric ease and beauty are sacrificed to crotchets
of diction and roughness of cadence throughout his book.
The main fault one has to find in the miscellaneous poems
is a vagueness, not of form, but of thought or sentiment:
the poet is frequently obscure; and the worst of it is that
those poems which demand most pains to get to the
centre of are least worth the pains. To say that Mr.
O'Shaughnessy's style is already absolutely individual or
by any means perfect would be rash ; but that it holds
sufficient good qualities and few enough bad qualities to
give sure token that he can, with earnest work, get him-
self a complete and self-sufficient manner, one need not
hesitate to affirm; and it seems probable that, as years go
on, he will have that to tell to men which will be well
worth the garment of a perfect poetic manner of speech.
THE END.
LONDON:
ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.

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