CHAPTER XXXIV. POETS AFTER WORDSWORTH.

We now turn to the poets of the nineteenth century, after Wordsworth, though the first on the list was his senior in years. He is less important for his work than as the pioneer of the poets who, in the United States, contributed to the poetic literature of the English language.

Philip Freneau.

Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was the first American poet of any note. America, colonial or independent, has scarcely any early literary history, which may be mainly accounted for by the preoccupation of men's minds in taming the waste, in dispossessing the warlike natives, in establishing the Puritan theocracy in New England, and in war, whether colonial, against France and her Indian allies, or against the Old Country. Yet we might have expected lyrics, at least, from the non-Puritan settlers of the very literary age of Elizabeth and James I. and from Cavalier exiles of the period of Charles I. They must have been in love; but that poetic passion, among the colonists, was singularly tuneless. We might have looked for volumes on the new country in addition to the learned volume of William Strachey (who compares the religion, rites, and legends of the Red Tribes with those of Greece and Rome) and the larger and more romantic tome of Captain John Smith. The Anglo-Saxon colonists of this Isle of Britain lived even more hardly than the colonists in America; yet we have seen that, even in its scanty fragments, their poetry has distinction, sentiment, and pathos. But American poetry did not begin at the beginning in poems of personal sentiment and experience and in heroic lays. Religion, theological controversy, colonial history, and witchcraft fully occupied the flowing pen of[Pg 561] Cotton Mather (1663-1728). The theocracy, like that of Calvin, Knox, and Andrew Melville, which he supported, was broken by the turn of public opinion in 1692, against the hangings of witches on "spectral evidence" (subjective apparitions of the witches to their victims). On the witches, on religion, on colonial history with a controversial purpose ("Magnalia"), and on many other themes, Cotton Mather wrote at enormous length. He was a Bostonian, a Harvard man, and learned; in fact, he was the counterpart of his correspondent, Wodrow, the author of the "History of the Sufferings of the Kirk under the Restoration". His style is Jacobean rather than late Caroline, and the curious will find him "full of matter".

Religion inspired Jonathan Edwards; politics, science, and homely Hesiodic advice occupied Benjamin Franklin, but, as for poetry in America, it begins with Freneau, who was born eight years before Prince Charles's last hope of recovering England failed, and who died in the death year of Sir Walter Scott (1832). Freneau was a sailor, a journalist, a writer of patriotic verse during the War of Independence, and his best known poem is "The Indian Cemetery," which displays the same regret for a vanished people as the Anglo-Saxon "The Ruined City".

Thomas Campbell stole, consciously or unconsciously, a line from this piece. Here is Campbell, in "O'Connor's Child"—

Now on the grass-green turf he sits,
His tasselled horn beside him laid;
Now o'er the hills in chase he flits,
The hunter and the deer—a shade.

Freneau has—

By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews,
In habit for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer—a shade.

This plagiarism, by a Scot who ought to have known better, must be taken as a real case of extremely petty larceny. Any mortal who cared for grammar would have written, not "The hunter and the deer—a shade"—for arithmetically there were two shades—but

The hunter like the deer, a shade.

[Pg 562]

Campbell, if not Freneau, must have known that the passage coincides with the scene in Homer ("Odyssey," Book XI.) where the shade of Heracles pursues the shades of the animals which on earth he had slain. The cadences of Freneau are those of Mickle in "Cumnor Hall".

The dews of summer night did fall,
The Moon, sweet Regent of the sky,
Silver'd the walls of Cumnor Hall
And many an oak that grew thereby.

As a rule, Freneau's "Muse," like that of Mr. Lothian Dodd when slightly exhilarated, "was the patriotic," inspiriting to the contemporary warrior, but not of imperishable literary value. As senior in years to Tennyson and Browning, Freneau's compatriots, Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow, may here follow him in chronological order.

William Cullen Bryant.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was one of those concerning whom Sainte-Beuve says that they carry about in them a poet who died young. His tendency was to write Hymns to Proserpine; among the works which fascinated his boyhood were Blair's "Grave," Bishop Porteous on "Death" (the ghost of Mrs. Veal (1705), a qualified critic, preferred Drelincourt), and the hectic verses of Kirke White. Later came Wordsworth, perhaps too late; for Bryant's "Thanatopsis," written when he was 17, descends from such later works as follow the author of the Anglo-Saxon poem of "The Grave". Not much later came "The Water Fowl," a favourite of the compilers of anthologies. "Thanatopsis" was frequently retouched, and now closes with a passage of the highest ethical dignity, though to be sure there is little of hope in the idea that

each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of Death.

He was successful as a journalist,

the friend of Freedom's cause
As far away as Paris is,

and also at home, where the negro was concerned. He did not cease when an editor to write poetry, and he translated Homer[Pg 563] into blank verse. In reading Bryant's poems we cannot but see that he offered the best wine first, in pieces like "To a Water Fowl" and "The Yellow Violet". The former is full of charm in atmosphere and cadence, though the concluding moral, as in "The Yellow Violet," is inspired by Wordsworth. His best pieces of landscape, pictures of autumn and winter, are somewhat reminiscent of Cooper. "The Ages," a summary of the world's history in the stanza of Spenser, is more remarkable for the happy patriotism of its conclusion than for originality of thought. It is really amusing to see his inability to escape from the charms of the tomb,—tombs of Red Indians, or of conquerors or of kings, "in dusty darkness hid," all are welcome to him; and in "The Child's Funeral" the reader is happily surprised by the discovery that the infant, prematurely placed in the vault, is alive and enjoying himself.

John Greenleaf Whittier.

Whittier (1807-1892) was born of a rural Quaker family in Massachusetts. He was mainly self-taught; he early commenced journalist, on the side of the party opposed to slavery; and he retained no high esteem for his early flights in verse. He wrote much in the journal, "The New Era," which was fortunate enough to publish Mrs. Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and during the great war he was one of the bards who stimulated the valour of the North; much as another Quaker, by waving his hat, encouraged the Duke of Cumberland's dragoons at Prince Charles's rearguard action at Clifton. But there the side befriended by the English Quaker was not victorious. In "Snow-Bound" (1866) (the name-giving piece is a delightful picture of a happy winter's night in such a cottage as that of Whittier's boyhood) Whittier first met a popular success as a poet, though already some of his poems (probably pirated) were not unpopular in England. He was a good, earnest and amiable man, and, as a poet, copious and wholesome, rather than of curious and exquisite distinction. Many of his verses are religious, moral or political, and, despite his love of nature, his lines are not always, where nature is concerned, on a level with the best of Bryant. His stories in ballad or balladish form were naturally popular; "Maud Muller" is perhaps the best[Pg 564] known in England; he had a variety of themes, colonial, Red Indian, and generally historical. He even went to the "Rig-Veda"; and catholicity of taste is shown when an American Quaker sings of Soma, the rather mysterious nectar of Indra and other deities of the Indian Olympus. That his poems of war should be energetic, while he was professedly a man of peace, is not so remote from the practice of the earlier Friends as we are apt to suppose.[1]

His life,—his rustic and laborious youth, his irregular education, his absorption in the politics of his own country, his enthusiasm for Freedom's cause,—has a resemblance to the life of Burns, and makes him distinctly a national poet. But it is needless to enumerate the points in Bums which are missing in Whittier!

Perhaps an alien may venture to utter an idea which was in his mind before he found that it had been expressed by a fellow-countryman of the poet. Professor Barrett Wendell writes, concerning some of Whittier's pieces, "they belong to that school of verse which perennially flourishes and withers in the poetical columns of country newspapers". The verse of the country newspaper was the wild-stock of Whittier's rose; the wild-stock of Burns was the folk-song of Scotland. Whittier had to educate himself, and his genius often lifted him far above the artless verse of his youth. He was not wholly unimitative. In his famous appeal, "Massachusetts to Virginia," we read—

And sandy Barnstaple rose up, wet with the salt sea spray;
And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narraganset Bay,
Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill,
And the cheers of Hampshire's woodmen swept down from Holyoke hill,
.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .  .  .  .  .  .  .    .    .
And the red glare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of Carlisle!

It is Macaulay's "Armada"!

There is a mountain peak in America which bears the name of the renowned statesman, Daniel Webster. Whittier, in days before the war, had written against Daniel Webster, more in sorrow than in anger, the poem called "Ichabod".

[Pg 565]

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!
The glory from his grey hairs gone
For ever more.

Much later, in a kind of palinode, he, addressing the shade of Webster, gave a good example of the vigour of his octosyllabics!

But, where the native mountains bare
Their foreheads to diviner air,
Fit emblem of enduring fame,
One lofty summit keeps thy name.
For thee, the cosmic forces did
The rearing of that pyramid,
The prescient ages shaping with
Fire, flood, and frost thy monolith.

The rigorous critic may say that the idea is derived from Byron; and object to

forces did
The rearing of that pyramid,

as a somewhat colloquial idiom, but the lines have very great speed and vigour.

If we insist that a very young literature must produce for inspection her national poet (and Mr. Lowell says that foreign critics made this demand very early indeed) the poet cannot be Poe, and Whitman is hardly eligible. Whittier seems, so far, to be the best candidate for the bays.

Many admirers of Burns will be eager to confess that Whittier's "Snow-bound" has merits superior to those of the Ayrshire ploughman's companion-piece, "The Cottar's Saturday Night".

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Longfellow, by far the most popular, in his own country and in England, of American poets, was born at Portland, Maine, in 1807; he was two years older than Tennyson. He was a contemporary at Bowdoin College of his country's greatest novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1826 he began three "travel-years" which prepared him for the Chair of French and Spanish literature, first held by George Ticknor in 1817; he first taught at Bowdoin, and in 1836 succeeded Ticknor at Harvard. American literature[Pg 566] now began to be affected by the poets of the European continent, which had, ever since Chaucer, and especially in the Elizabethan age, fostered the poetry of England. Only the morally pure and elevating elements in continental literature affected Longfellow; and this was not precisely the case where Chaucer and the Elizabethans were concerned. Indeed, the greater literature of the United States is not mastered by the Passions; Byron, Shelley, and Burns were never its idols, and Hawthorne did a daring thing when he wrote "The Scarlet Letter". Longfellow, whom Poe absurdly accuses of plagiarism, was no imitator. He had a note, simple indeed, but his own. As far as any traces in his work of Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, are apparent, we might suppose that he had never read them. This kind of originality is not always found even in considerable poets. The measure of Scott's "Lay" is borrowed from "Christabel"; Burns usually had a model which he transfigured; Byron's Oriental tales in verse are bad copies from Scott in versification;—but the minor poet is always imitative.

Longfellow, like the enemy of Bonaparte mentioned by Heine, was "still a professor" till 1854, when he was succeeded by Mr. Lowell. While occupying an academic Chair he published perhaps his best-known work, "The Voices of the Night" (1839), his "Evangeline" (pathos in English hexameters) in 1847, and "The Golden Legend" in 1851. In his first book Longfellow "made a bull's-eye" in hitting the public taste. The bull's-eye rang to the anvil strokes of "The Village Blacksmith". Young men shouted "Excelsior" as they walked the streets, like the two Writers to the Signet who met each other shouting lines from Flodden in "Marmion" on the North Bridge of Edinburgh. It is true that

To the Lords of Convention 'twas Claverhouse spoke,

or

The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood,

or

The laurel, the palms, and the p?an, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake,

are perhaps even more provocative than "Excelsior" to him who shouts "for his personal diversion". But it is much to write verses[Pg 567] which provoke this kind of enthusiasm among persons not apt to be stirred by literature. On mature reflection, the maiden in "Excelsior" was rather "in a coming on disposition,"

He answered as he turned away,
"What would the Junior Proctor say?"

is a pardonable academic parody. If you analyse the similes in "The Psalm of Life," you meet some shipwrecked brother who, though he has piled up his bark on some reef, is still sailing o'er Time's dreary main, and taking comfort in observing, through his glass, that somebody has left footprints on the sands. Enfin, these poems have "that!" as Reynolds said, though the metaphors are mixed as if by the master-hand of Sir Boyle Roche. These things are not Longfellow's masterpieces, and they, with the apocryphal viking's "Skeleton in Armour," are best read in happy and uncritical boyhood. At any age we may appreciate such lines as—

The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair,
The best beloved Night,

and

I remember the black wharves and the slips,
And the sea-tide, tossing free,
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and the mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.

Simplicity is dominant in Longfellow's verse; and he has "a message" on which he is perhaps too fond of dwelling. In one of his anti-slavery poems the hero, like Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, is a king in his own country, though the slave trade in "black ivory" direct from Africa was no longer extant. In "Hiawatha" he reproduced the measure of the Finnish "Kalewala" with much of the woodland perfume of the original poem. To boys fresh from Cooper's novels the tale is a delight if it has palled on more sophisticated tastes. Theocritus hoped that his verses "would be on men's lips, above all on the lips of the young". If this were Longfellow's ambition he had his reward in full. He wrote for a young people, in the boyhood of its own literature, and opened for it the magical volume of old romance, and his hold on those who read him in youth can never be shaken, being strengthened by all happy and tender memories. His muse

[Pg 568]

Sits and gazes at us,
With those deep and tender eyes.
Like the stars, so still and saint-like.
Looking downwards from the skies.

Alfred Tennyson.

Born in 1809, the son of the Rev. George Tennyson, Rector of the parish at Somersby in the Lincolnshire Wolds, Alfred Tennyson was a schoolboy when Keats and Byron died. At the age of 8, he says, "I remember making a line I thought grander than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott..." it was this—

With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood.

The context is absent, but the line is sonorous, and utterly unlike anything that the child could find in the poems with which he was already acquainted, those of Thomson, Scott, Byron, and Campbell. Even if he had read Milton, the line gave promise of his originality as an "inventor of harmonies" in blank verse. After imitating Pope, and, on a large scale (6000 verses), copying Scott, Tennyson wrote, at 14, a drama in blank verse. Of this a chorus survives in Tennyson's volume of 1830, and in such lines as these about the mountains riven

By secret fire and midnight storms
That wander round their windy cones,

we already find his manner, his use of a favourite epithet, and his interest in the forces that

Draw down the ?onian hills and sow
The dust of continents to be.

At 17 (1826), after being "dominated by Byron," he "put him away altogether," and this was the tendency of his generation at Cambridge, of Thackeray, Monckton Milnes, and others. In 1827 "Poems by Two Brothers," Alfred and his brother Frederick (Charles, too, contributed) were published, but contained none of the verses stamped with his own unmistakable mark which he had already composed. Among these the ballad on a wooing like that of the Bride of Lammermoor is specially original. At 19 (1828) Tennyson wrote "The Lover's Tale" in blank verse,—he had not yet read Shelley, but the Italian scenery, and the rich imagery, are somewhat in Shelley's manner. The book was published[Pg 569] fifty years later (1879); only the two first parts were written in youth. Tennyson went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1828, where he met Thackeray, FitzGerald, Milnes (Lord Houghton), and Arthur Hallam, son of the historian, and the foremost of his friends. He contributed to the essays of this set,—"The Apostles," a paper on "Ghosts," and won the prize poem on "Timbuctoo" by an obscure production in blank verse. Concerning the cause of its success there is an amusing if apocryphal anecdote.

In 1830, when Bulwer Lytton was declaring that novels had killed the taste for poetry, Tennyson's first volume appeared. The obvious fault was the affected diction; babblings as of Leigh Hunt; but in "Mariana in the Moated Grange," Tennyson declared his real self; as in "The Ode to Memory," "The Dying Swan," "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," and "Oriana". Here we discern Tennyson's mastery of original cadences; his close observation of Nature; his opulent language, and his visions of romance. "The Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind" displays the doubts that recur in "In Memoriam"; and "The Mystic" reveals a very potent element in his character, that of the visionary with elusive experiences of "dissociation" approaching to "trance". In a beautiful passage of "In Memoriam," these experiences are again cast, as far as possible, "in matter moulded forms of speech". Before 1830 Tennyson had anticipated, in an essay, the modern doctrine of the evolution of man from the lowest rudimentary forms of life, and had also personal psychological experiences like those of Plotinus and other late Platonic philosophers.

In 1832 almost all of the poems of the new volume of 1833 had been composed. This book included the first shape, magical but more or less humorous, and confused in form, of "The Lady of Shalott"; with the first form of "?none" (written in the Pyrenees during a tour with Hallam), "The Miller's Daughter," which needed and received much correction, as did "The Palace of Art". Here, too, first appeared the passion of "Fatima," the perfect "Mariana in the South," and "The Lotus Eaters," which has, in brief space, all the languor and all the charm of Spenser; it is a poem never[Pg 570] excelled by Tennyson. A very amusing review, by Lockhart in "The Quarterly," mocked at all the many faults, but never alluded to the more numerous and essential beauties of the book. Ten years later Lockhart repented, and handed Tennyson's two volumes of 1842 to his friend Sterling, for criticism which could not be mocking. The poet, though naturally sensitive to criticism, had bowed to censures which, as he saw, were deserved, and had substituted noble lines for the earlier inequalities and eccentricities.

The sudden death at Vienna, of Arthur Hallam, in September, 1833, was a shock and a sorrow which left an indelible mark on the poet's character and genius. He composed, not much later, "The Two Voices," and the resolute and noble "Ulysses"; with "Sir Galahad," that absolute romantic lyric; "Tithonus," perhaps the most perfect of all his poems on classical mythology; "The Morte d'Arthur," the greatest of his idylls on the cycle of Arthur; and he wrote many parts of "In Memoriam". He had chosen Poverty for his mate, with poetry, like Wordsworth.

In 1842 appeared the two volumes which contain the flower and fruit of Tennyson's youth. Much that was new, with more that was re-formed from early immature phases, was offered; and such excellence in so many various styles, including the rural idylls—the light and charming "Day Dream" (The Sleeping Beauty), "The Talking Oak," and again "The Dream of Fair Women," the strange romantic "Vision of Sin"; the classical and Arthurian poems—to mention no others,—was never exhibited by a young English poet. There was little to regret or discard, and even "The May Queen" had this merit or demerit that it at once became extremely popular. Here was a fortunate "alacrity in sinking"! In the opinion of "Old Fitz" (Fitz Gerald), Tennyson never regained the level of these two thin volumes of 1842: perhaps we may say that he never rose above that level.

"The Princess" (1847) contains several of his most perfect lyrics, and all the charm of his blank verse, but it is professedly a fantasy; the poet "is not always wholly serious," he writes somewhat in the vein of "Love's Labour's Lost". In 1850 appeared, anonymously, "In Memoriam," the record of three years of pain,[Pg 571] and of strivings with the Giant of Bunyan's Doubting Castle. We cannot discuss the reasonings, the waverings, the reviewings of the then most recent theories of evolution, with their presumed theological consequences; but the lover of poetry who cannot find it in "In Memoriam" may perhaps be regarded as not destitute of prejudices. Tennyson would be more universally appreciated as a great and delightful poet if he had never expressed any of his personal opinions about politics, society, morals, or religion in verse. His two volumes of 1842 contain nothing, or very little, that can annoy the most sensitive up-to-date spirit.

In 1850, Tennyson, by that time married, succeeded Wordsworth in the Laureateship. The first fruits of his office was the magnificent "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1852). In 1855 appeared "Maud," which is prejudiced by the "topical" allusions to the Crimean War, and by the appearance, as hero and narrator, of a modern Master of Ravenswood, who is, according to the poet himself "a morbid poetic soul... an egotist with the makings of a cynic". The love-poetry is beautiful; and most beautiful are the exquisite lines "O that 'twere possible". But the day for a kind of tale or novel of modern life, in verse, had passed before the death of Crabbe.

In 1859 appeared the first four "Idylls of the King," "Enid," from a mediaeval tale in the Welsh "Mabinogion"; "Elaine," and "Guinevere," from the "Morte d'Arthur," and "Vivien," they beguiler of the wise Merlin, from the same source. All are rich in beauties of style, in visions of Nature, in such characters as Elaine and Lancelot, and in delicate observation; except "Vivien" all the Idylls were eagerly welcomed; though some critics held that Arthur preached too much to his fallen Queen.

Thackeray wrote to his "dear old Alfred" that the Idylls had given him "a splendour of happiness.... Gold and purple and diamonds, I say, gentlemen, and glory and love and honour, and if you haven't given me all these why should I be in such an ardour of gratitude? But I have had out of that dear book the greatest delight that has come to me since I was a young man." Old men who were schoolboys when Thackeray wrote thus, felt, and feel, what Thackeray expresses. The Idylls were continued[Pg 572] later, to the number of twelve;—not all are of equal merit; none perhaps is so good as the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842, but the whole are the poetic rival, in romantic charm, in haunting evasive allegory, and in ethics, of Malory's great old book. In the Idylls, as in Malory, we find, as Caxton had written four hundred years earlier, "the gentle and virtuous deeds that some knights used in these days, noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, love, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin." The tragedy of Lancelot and Guinevere, the mystic interlude of the Quest for the Grail, the ruin of that world, and the passing of Arthur, were all given by old romance, and are all beautified by charm of diction, and countless pictures of Nature, and similes worthy of Homer, such as

So dark a forethought rolled about his brain,
As on a dull day in an Ocean cave
The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall
In silence.

In "Enoch Arden" (1864) Tennyson again displayed his matchless variety of command over all classes of poetic themes, and added to "In Memoriam" a lyric full of the tranquil tenderness of an immortal love, "In the Valley of Cauteretz". Once more choosing a novel and difficult and sublime topic, he gave us "Lucretius," a study of the magnificent ruin of a supreme heart and soul and intellect.

Of the seven plays published between 1875 and 1892 there is not space to speak; but by common admission the genius of Tennyson was not fitted for the drama of the stage. In 1880 the poet, unconquerable by Time, gave, in "Ballads and Other Poems," the nobly passionate dramatic monologue of "Rizpah"; and his most thrilling war-song, "The Revenge". With 1885 came the Virgilian cadences of the lines to Virgil, written for the poet's townsmen, the Mantuans, on that

Golden branch amid the shadows,
Kings and realms that pass to rise no more.

Tennyson's genius was, indeed, akin to that of Virgil in tenderness, in "the sense of tears in mortal things," in elaborate and exquisite[Pg 573] art, and in the selecting and polishing and re-setting of jewels from the poetry of ancient Greece. We saw, in the opening of this volume, how from age to age Homer's descriptions of the Elysian land, and of the home of the gods, reached an Anglo-Saxon minstrel; and now Tennyson recasts the thoughts in his picture of "the island valley of Avilion," the Celtic paradise.

At the age of 81, like Sophocles unsubdued by time, and still absolute master of his art, he composed one of his supreme lyrics, "Crossing the Bar": we repeat it and we marvel at the exquisite unison of thought with music. Even in "The Death of ?none" the aged hand no "uncertain warbling made".

The poet crossed the bar on 6 October, 1892, his Shakespeare by his side, and his open chamber-window flooded by moonlight. It is probable that we live too near Tennyson to appreciate his greatness. "Men hardly know how beautiful fire is," says Shelley; the phenomenon is too familiar; but later generations will know and understand, and through the darkness of time will follow the light of this "Golden Branch among the Shadows".

Robert Browning.

Born three years later than Tennyson, in May, 1812, Robert Browning's first published poem, "Pauline," appeared in the same year as Tennyson's second volume of verse, namely in 1833. Thenceforward the careers of the two poets were, in some respects, curiously similar, as each "flourished" most decisively in 1840-1850. Browning was a native of a London suburb, his father was a man of very active intelligence, a reader of old books; and though Browning, in boyhood, was educated at a private school, his essential instruction was that which he gave himself in his father's library. At an early age, about 16, he read Shelley, and an intense enthusiasm for Shelley, as a man and poet, pervades his "Pauline". The poem is a monologue addressed to Pauline, on "the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study," as Browning wrote in the dedication of "Sordello". The poem is, naturally, more or less autobiographical; like Wordsworth's "The Prelude," it was intended to be but part of a large work, "so many utterances of so many imaginary[Pg 574] persons, not mine—poetry always dramatic in principle," so the author wrote in 1867, and the speaker in "Pauline" is really but as one of Browning's "Men and Women," and "Dramatis Person?". The work contains several passages of great beauty, written in a "regular" style of blank verse without eccentricity, and is full of promise of success in a path which, later, as far as form is concerned, Browning did not follow. The construction of the paragraphs of blank verse is in places difficult, indeed obscure, a fault which haunted the poet's manner.

Of "Pauline" not a single copy was purchased: and it was with reluctance that Browning, much later, permitted it to appear among his works. His "Paracelsus" (1835) is in form a drama with four characters, and is, again, a story of "incidents in the development of a soul," that of a famous chemist, half mystic, half charlatan (1493-1541) who

determined to become
The greatest and most glorious man on earth.

For him unattainable Science is "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," and her, dead votaries call to him

Lost, lost! yet come!
With our wan troop make thy home.

There are one or two charming lyrics, but there is a weight of prolixity, and almost entire absence of action. The poem, however, obtained for Browning recognition among men of letters and special students of poetry, when he was not yet 24 years of age. He knew Talfourd, whose "Ion" (1835) was a recognized dramatic triumph at the moment; Forster, the friend and biographer of Dickens (with Forster, Browning's relations later were stormy), and Macready, the actor, who (1837) put his "Strafford" on the stage, with but slight success. Browning's dramas intended to be acted have had even less hold on the scenic world than Tennyson's; "A Blot in the Scutcheon," (1843) might have fared better but was thwarted by the internal politics of the stage. "Sordello" (1840), a narrative in heroic verse, though of an original sort that would have puzzled Dry den, was again the study of "a soul," that of a legendary Mantuan mediaeval poet and soldier,[Pg 575] mentioned by Dante. The abundance of mediaeval Italian history,—introducing, as familiar to all, matters which were but vaguely known by few,—and the long hurrying sentences, following trains of ideas associated only in the poet's mind, defeated the ordinary reader. As

Here the Chief immeasurably yawned

in a long passage of exposition, so did the world, and "Sordello" was a stumbling-block in the path of the poet's fame.

On the other hand, in "Pippa Passes" (1841) Browning produced a drama partly lyrical, partly in prose, partly in blank verse, full of variety, humour, strength, and charm, and with that vein of optimism which is never unwelcome. Just as Tennyson "came to his own" with his two volumes of 1842, so the works published by Browning (1841-1846) in cheap numbers, as "Bells and Pomegranates," gave assurance of his originality and his greatness. His dramatic lyrics, when they came, were poetry of a new kind, in measures as various as the moods; here was a "garden of the souls" so rich and strange, so full of novelty of incident, of observation in Italy and in England, as had never before been presented to a world which, for the moment, regarded it not. The strangeness in places might throw a shade on the beauty; the poet did not by any means always choose to make audible, in his verse, the music to which, as an art, he was devoted. In 1855 his "Men and Women" did at last win to the favour first of an enthusiastic few, then of all lovers of poetry. The very names of the poems, from "Bishop Blougram" to "In a Gondola," "Porphyria's Lover," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "The Last Ride together," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," "A Grammarian's Funeral," call up a troop of visionary pictures; while "Christmas Eve and Easter Day" (1850) opens Browning's series of meditations on faith and the mysteries of existence. The poet's life, from his marriage to another poet, Miss Barrett (1846), to her death in 1861, was spent, in great part, in Italy, mainly in Florence; and Italian history, literature, art, and politics constantly inspired him.

In 1864 appeared his "Dramatis Person?," of the same varied character as "Men and Women". Of the new poems the[Pg 576] speculations of "Abt Vogler," the musician, of "Rabbi Ben Ezra,"—the faith pronouncing all things very good,—the gallant resolution in face of death of "Prospice," won for Browning the applause of readers who value "thought" in poetry. Of these, many preferred the passages most difficult of comprehension, and found joy in mysteries where the difficulties were really caused by the manner of the poet.

In 1868 a world which had neglected Browning fell with enthusiasm on the four successive volumes of "The Ring and the Book". Here all persons concerned in a peculiarly brutal set of murders of 1698, and many lookers-on, give their own versions and their own views of the characters and events, while the lawyers have their say, and the Pope sums up all in a poem by a fourth part longer than the "Iliad".

The last twenty years of the poet's life were prolific in books very various in character from "Fifine at the Fair" (1872), and "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country" (1873), to "Asolando," in 1889, the year of his death. His "Transcript" from Euripides is not merely rugged, but very quaint. The method is the old method, but a growing wilfulness often mars the results—the defect of Browning's quality. His resolute courage never failed; he was firm on the rock of his belief; but it is probable that he will always be best known by the work of his central period, from "Pippa Passes" to "Dramatis Person?". He is the poet of love, of life, and of the will to live; here and beyond the grave; and he is the expounder, and, indeed, the creator, of innumerable characters, while, if his poetry lacks "natural magic," and supreme felicity of phrase, his pictures are largely and vigorously designed and coloured. No poet perhaps, save Scott, showed so little of the poet in general society; no man was more kindly and natural in his ways.

Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Poe, born in 1809 at Boston, was on the mother's side English, but in genius he was of no nationality. His parents, who were actors, died early, and he was adopted at the age of 2 by a gentleman of Virginia, Mr. Allan, with whom he passed five[Pg 577] years in Europe (1815-1820). From the University of Virginia he passed, as poets are apt to do, in the disfavour of his dons, nor did he long abide at West Point, the military school, leaving in 1831 in very unfortunate circumstances. Like Shakespeare in the tradition he "was given to all manner of unluckiness," such as losing more money at cards than he could pay, which estranged his guardian. In 1827, at the age of 18, he had published the now almost indiscoverable volume of verse, "Tamerlane and Other Poems". He betook himself to journalism, writing verses, criticisms (whereby he made many enemies) and short stories. With his genius for these, whether tales of gruesome mystery, or of treasure-hunting, or of a marvellous detective, he would, in the America of to-day, have been rich, as authors count riches. But his pay was infinitesimal, and he lived in dire poverty, always longing for a magazine of his own; but his engagements as an editor were neither permanent nor lucrative. He was, in "The Gold Bug," the founder of all stories of hidden treasure, and all detective stories descend from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". In composing "crawlers," as R. L. Stevenson called tales of horror, he had no rival. He always avoided the supernatural; his effects were mortuary, and he was too partial to premature burials. His style was that of an artist, clean and sober, in "The Gold Bug," but in such pieces as "The Fall of the House of Usher" he aimed at poetical effects in prose. The doors of the doomed mansion "threw slowly back their ponderous and ebony jaws". Poe appears to have had the wish to be a scholar; he may even, by many allusions to unfamiliar books, give the impression that his reading is very wide, but scholarship was inconsistent with his restless and poverty-stricken life. Yet something of the fastidiousness of the scholar possessed him, and made him a student of style, and a relentless reviewer of the many nobodies who formed the majority of his literary contemporaries. His poetry is the very reverse of "a criticism of life". His heroes, if in love at all, are constant to some belle morte, Annabel Lee or the Lost Lenore; and he has no hope of attaining to the love of his most beautiful poem,—

[Pg 578]

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicèan barques of yore,

(where Nicèan seems to mean Ph?acian). He combines the maximum of music in his verse with the minimum of human nature, of flesh and blood. His "Ulalume," with its recurrent and re-echoing double rhymes, trembles on the verge between pure nonsense and some realm beyond the bounds of known romanticism:—

Hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir.

Weir, we surmise, is not far from

the sunset land of Boshen,
In the midmost of the Ocean,

where dwelt the Yonghi Bonghi Bo.

The celebrated "Raven," probably by far his most popular poem, winged his way to Poe's study from the cliffs which frown on the dim lake of Auber. His fancy for ever dwells "out of space, out of time," where it has learned that mysterious music of his which can be parodied, but cannot be recaptured. He has heard the harping of Israfel, and follows it in "a mortal melody".

Thus, in "The Haunted Palace,"

Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow,.
(This—all this—was in the olden
Times long ago.)
And every gentle air that dallied
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid
A winged odour went away.

Poe's versification was self-taught, and his verse, so small in volume and so original, was precisely adapted to the dreams of which his poetry is made. He wrote "There is no such thing as a long poem," meaning that no long poem can be uniformly exquisite. Yet he never attained to what is most entirely exquisite, apart from actuality, and dreamlike, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". As has been said of Gerard de Nerval, "his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of this earth, and far from human shores, his[Pg 579] fancy haunts graveyards, or the fabled harbours of happy stars "; night is light to him, and daytime is darkness. Like Gerard's, his overword is

Où sont nos amoureuses?
Elles sont au tombeau!
Elles sont plus heureuses
Dans un séjour plus beau.

Perhaps because he is so non-American, so decidedly a citizen of no city, Poe has been more admired on the Continent, and translated into more languages than any poet of America. His works were admirably rendered into French by Charles Baudelaire, himself an adorer of

The love whom I shall never meet,
The land where I shall never be.

Poe died in 1849; legends of his life are many and negligible. He is a poet who has not much honour in his own country, or who, at least, has more honour in countries not his own. To call him a great poet is impossible, but he is a haunting poet. His prose stories were dismissed as "Hawthorne and delirium tremens" by a great English critic, but really his horrors are carefully designed and elaborated works, polished ad unguem; rather cold than frenzied,—witness "The Cask of Amontillado".

Critics, and many readers, have a passion for "classing" poets, as if they were in an examination. We cannot call Poe great, for poetry deals with life, with action, with passion, with duty, and with the whole of the great spectacle of Nature. To the Muse of Poe these things are indifferent; but to the singing of the dreams with which he dwells he brings such originality of tone and touch as is rare indeed in the poetry of any people. As a critic, too, he is a pioneer of the school of l'art pour l'art, of art for art's sake—a school distinctly decadent, and therefore in modern Europe he, rather than Aristotle, is hailed as a prince of critics.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803) was born at Boston of what the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table liked to call "the Brahmin caste"; that is the educated clerical class, ministers from father to[Pg 580] son. A similar class existed in Scotland after the Reformation.[2] Preaching was in the blood of these gentlemen of Boston. Emerson, after breaking away from Unitarianism in a singular sermon at Boston (1832), continued to preach, when he could find an audience, and then betook himself to lecturing, first on scientific subjects, and next on literature and things in general. In 1837 he delivered to the Φ B K Society at Harvard a lecture on "The American Scholar". He said: "Mr. President and Gentlemen, This confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe". Indeed Ticknor, Longfellow, and Lowell successively held a Chair founded for the precise purpose of listening to the courtly Muses of mediaeval and modern Europe. But the American scholar, it seems, was to listen neither to them nor to Homer, Virgil, and Horace, nor even to Isaiah, who was much about an Asiatic Court. Walt Whitman must be the typical American scholar, from the point of view of Emerson.

The position of Emerson, as poet and essayist, is matter of controversy among the learned of his own country. In a poem styled "Nature," Emerson writes:—

She is gamesome and good
But of mutable mood,—
No dreary repeater now and again,
She will be all things to all men,
She who is old but nowise feeble
Pours her power into the people.

As to his prose, Prof. Barrett Wendell of Harvard writes: "The Essays are generally composed of materials which he collected for purposes of lecturing.... He would constantly make note of any idea which occurred to him; and when he wished to give a lecture he would huddle together as many of those notes as would fill the assigned time, trusting with all the calm assurance of his unfaltering individualism that the truth inherent in the separate memoranda would give them all together the unity[Pg 581] implied in the fact of their common sincerity.... The fact that these essays were so often delivered as lectures should remind us of what they really are.... Emerson's essays, in short, prove to be an obvious development from the endless sermons with which for generations his ancestors had regaled the New England fathers."

Professor Trent of Columbia University asks: "Shall we not follow Emerson's own lead, and call him frankly a great poet, basing the title on these and similar essays" ("Circles" and "The Oversoul") "and on the somewhat scanty but still important mass of his compositions in authentic poetic form"—of which a poor specimen has just been given. Some of Emerson's fellow-citizens, Professor Trent says, answer his question in the affirmative. Emerson, on the strength of his prose and verse, is "a great poet". "Others equally cultivated maintain that many of his poems are only versified versions of his essays, and declare that save in rare passages he is deficient in passion, in sensuousness, in simplicity ..." while Mr. Trent, speaking for himself, says that Emerson "is prone to jargon, to bathos, to lapses of taste". Mr. Matthew Arnold, and Charles Baudelaire, agreed with the second and less favourable party of American critics. Baudelaire's remarks were intemperate in style, but Mr. Trent thinks that, "it seems as if the time had come for Emerson's countrymen frankly to accept the verdict" of Matthew Arnold, that Emerson's prose "was not of sufficient merit to entitle him to be ranked as a great man of letters".

It does not become an alien to interfere in this unsettled controversy. In literary criticism of modern English poetry Emerson said that Pope "wrote poetry fit to put round frosted cake". Walter Scott "wrote a rhymed traveller's guide to Scotland," Wordsworth had the merit of being "conscientious," Byron was "passional," Tennyson "factitious".

It is, of course, impossible here to discuss Emerson as a philosopher. He is spoken of as an Idealist, but he seems to lean a little to Pragmatism. "The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular theory is this, that it presents the world in precisely[Pg 582] that view which is most desirable to the mind." To whose mind? Emerson visited England twice; after the second tour he wrote "English Traits". Dickens had done, regrettably, the same sort of work in "American Notes," and "Martin Chuzzlewit". Authors on each side of the Atlantic took the advice of the elder Mr. Weller, and abused the countries and peoples that they visited, Emerson hitting the darker blots in our society. He had an influence, mainly over young men, in both countries, scarcely inferior to that of Carlyle; but left nothing so massive and concrete as Carlyle's "Frederick," "Cromwell," and "The French Revolution". Having quoted from Professor Barrett Wendell passages which leave rather a mournful impression, we must add that, in his opinion, Emerson's work "surely seems alive with such unconditioned freedom of temper as makes great literature so inevitably lasting". Professor Trent, while confessing "that true poetic glow and flow are almost entirely absent from Emerson's verses, and that his ever-recurring and often faulty octosyllabic couplets soon become wearisome," declines to rank him with Tennyson, Shelley, or Longfellow, and ends: "But to Americans, at least, Emerson is an important poet, whose best work seems likely to gain rather than to lose value".

James Russell Lowell.

The poetic qualities of Whittier and of James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) are pleasantly indicated in Mr. Lowell's sonnet to Whittier on his seventy-fifth birthday.[3]

Here is deserved praise of Whittier's studies of Nature, and of his anti-slavery Tyrt?an verse, while the poet betrays his own affection for the sonorous, heroic song of early mediaeval France, "The Song of Roland".

The circumstances of Lowell's birth and career were as different as possible from those of the tuneful farm-boy. Lowell, like Holmes, Emerson, and so many others, was of the hereditarily cultivated class of New England, clergymen from generation to generation. He was born at his father's place, Elmwood, near[Pg 583] Cambridge, was educated at Harvard, lived there, as Matthew Arnold said of himself at Balliol, "as if it had been a great country house," was sent down, for some frolic, to Concord, where he met the sage Emerson, "chaffed" that philosopher and Carlyle in rhymes, and displayed, generally, the gaiety of the undergraduate. Mr. Lowell, in fact, in manner and personal appearance, was, though an enthusiastic patriot, like anything but a "foreigner". He was called to the bar, but preferred literature to law, and wrote prose and verse for the magazines. In 1846 he began the first set of "The Biglow Papers," very lively studies in American politics as rurally understood by the Rev. Hosea Wilbur and Bird o' Freedom Sawin. In satiric and humorous poetry, in dialect, he was supreme from the first. In 1848, he produced "A Fable for Critics"; the idea may have been suggested by Suckling's rhymed and bantering criticism of contemporary minstrels, in his "Session of the Poets". The rhymes in "The Festival of the Poets" are more than Hudibrastic; the measure is anap?stic. It is the work of a young man who is amusing himself in a crowd of scribblers, each claiming to be "the American Scott," "the American Dante," and so forth. Hawthorne finds a place and Cooper.

Here's Cooper, who's written six volumes to show
He's as good as a lord: well, let's grant that he's so;
But he need take no pains to convince us he's not
(As his enemies say) the American Scott.

Of Emerson

His prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows,
Is some of it pr—; no, it's not even prose.
All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he's got,
To I don't (nor they either) exactly know what.

As for Bryant, somebody

Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but Wordsworth
May be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd's worth,

cries this patriot.

Whittier's manliness is applauded,

But his grammar's not always correct, nor his rhymes,
And he's prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes.

Concerning Poe,

Three-fifths of him's genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,

[Pg 584]

which is perfectly true, but where, except in Poe and Hawthorne, was the man with even two-fifths of genius? That Theocritus, were he living, "would scarce change a line" in the hexameters of Longfellow's "Evangeline," is a criticism dictated by friendship. The mere name of "The Vision of Sir Launfal" suggests the influence of Tennyson. The verse, however, is not imitative; the moral is excellent, and "American children," we learn, have been set to studying "Sir Launfal" in annotated editions, perhaps a pathetic illustration of what may be called "the patriotic fallacy in matters connected with literature".[4]

In 1862-1863, the Civil War gave a motive for new "Biglow Papers," which were deservedly popular in England as well as in America. "The Commemoration Ode" has the same origin, in patriotism and resentment of the European attitude. This Ode is perhaps the seal of Mr. Lowell's diploma as a poet; the third and fifth sections, on the Harvard men who fell in battle, are swift, sonorous, and inspiring. When the poet exclaims, "Tell us not of Plantagenets," the critic can only murmur that he had no notion of telling of persons like Richard C?ur de Lion, "whose thin blood crawls". "'Tis with Lincoln, not with Richard, that the poem has to do," Bret Harte might have said. Indeed the Ode is too long. The ode "Under the Old Elm," practically an ode to Washington, is dignified, and of historic interest; perhaps no other poet has more worthily celebrated "that unblemished gentleman," the national hero; and the last section, addressed to Virginia, has a noble dying fall, like the close of the "Iliad". But not of popular appeal are such lines as these:—

O for a drop of that Cornelian ink
Which gave Agricola dateless length of days.

Here the Professor (who held Longfellow's chair at Harvard) interrupts the poet. The reference is to the brief biography by Tacitus of his father-in-law.

In 1877 Mr. Lowell went as American Minister to Spain, a country always of high attraction to American men of letters, historians, or poets. From 1880 to 1885 Mr. Lowell represented[Pg 585] his country at the Court of St. James, and won the hearts of all who had the honour of his friendship. As a speaker on many occasions where literature and art were concerned he was without a rival; in conversation his humour, wit, vast knowledge of men and of books, and his simple spontaneous kindness, endeared him to all. With Shenstone his friends might say, "Quanto minus est cum reliquis versari, quam tui meminisse,"—"Memory of him is dearer than life with others".

Concerning the mass of Mr. Lowell's shorter poems, many of them occasional, it may, perhaps, be said that few of them stamp themselves on the memory by any strong individuality of thought and cadence, and that he did not take Keats's advice to Shelley, "load every rift with ore". In a favourite passage opening:—

And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays.

the last line has a certain dissonance. His critical essays are of many various degrees of value. In his essay on "Swinburne's Tragedies" (1866, "Chastelard" and "Atalanta") he never seems to perceive the extraordinary and unprecedented merit of the lyrical measures, which are something better than "graceful, flowing, and generally simple in sentiment and phrase". In quite a different field the long essay on "Witchcraft" is rather antiquated, because we now know so much more about the psychology of the subject than was known when the essay was written. After philosophizing with Mr. E. B. Tylor on the origin of the belief in spirits, the critic honestly exclaims: "I am puzzled, I confess, to explain the appearance of the first ghost, especially among men who thought death to be the end-all here below". That is the puzzle, and Lucretius, who is quoted, could not solve it, nor had Mr. Lowell heard of "deferred telepathic impressions". This kind of topic allowed the author to bring in countless illustrations from his wide knowledge of all literatures, especially from the early mediaeval French, of which he was a votary before "Aucassin et Nicolete" and the heroic epics and sweet earliest lyrics were appreciated out of France. The essay on Rousseau contains the[Pg 586] usual apologies which critics of English blood make for a man of genius whom at heart they do not like, while the criticism of Pope is true and just, but not specially original; and the paper on Milton (a review of a recent biography and edition) would be better if purged of comments on Professor Masson. The comments on Wordsworth are extremely amusing to non-Wordsworthians, for the Wordsworthian draws a decent veil over the poet's incredible treatment of "Helen of Kirkconnel".

And Bruce (as soon as he had slain
The Gordon), sailed away to Spain,
And fought with rage incessant,
Against the Moorish crescent,

using, no doubt, the javelin with which he had pinked Lochinvar. "In 'The Excursion' we are driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict of extenuating circumstances." It is not that Mr. Lowell judged Wordsworth by his feet of clay, but having once observed the absurdities of the bard of Rydal he did not know where to stop in treating a theme so diverting. To Dunbar he was absolutely ruthless: "whoso is national enough to like thistles may browse there to his heart's content". "I would rather have written that half stanza of Longfellow's in 'The Wreck of the Hesperus,' of 'the billow that swept her crew like icicles from her deck' than all Gawain Douglas's tedious enumeration of meteorological phenomena put together." Mr. Lowell was not a Scot, and was an attached friend of Professor Longfellow, whose half stanza is not of ravishing merit. This raid across the Border is made in an essay on Spenser, wherein Nash is said "to have far better claims than Swift to be called the English Rabelais". This is extremely severe on Rabelais! The undying youth of Mr. Lowell as of Matthew Arnold, may bear the blame of such freaks as theirs in criticism. Shelley's letters are not really of more merit than his lyrics, nor, if we are to call any one an English Rabelais, is Nash more worthy of the compliment than the author of "Gulliver"!

Matthew Arnold.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was the son of the Rev. Thomas Arnold, the famous Head Master of Rugby, and author of a[Pg 587] History of Rome. At Rugby and Balliol he gained the prize-poems; he was a Fellow of Oriel, where he did not reside long, marrying and becoming an Inspector of Schools in 1851. Melancholy as much of his poetry seems, he was known to his friends as "Glorious Mat," and, in his own words, he and his brother Thomas lived in Balliol as in a large country house. He was a great walker in Wordsworth's country and a keen trout-fisher. His first verses, signed A, "The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems," appeared in a slim volume in 1849; they have nothing of the amateur, and possess a note of their own, though the influence of Wordsworth is discernible. "He is the man for me," Arnold might have said, as Boileau did of Molière. Arnold did not think Tennyson un esprit puissant; indeed Wordsworth was the last of our poets whom he greatly admired, though he placed Byron (for other than Wordsworth's qualities) on the same eminence; and preferred Shelley's letters to his lyrics. Such were what most amateurs think the freaks of Arnold as a critic.

Of the play, or masque, or whatever it should be called, "Empedocles on Etna," his taste later rejected all but a few glorious passages; but again he relented, and admitted "Empedocles" within the canon of his works. He put forth a new volume of verse in 1855; "Merope," an imitation of the Greek tragedy, not of much merit, in 1858, and "New Poems" in 1867. The prefaces to "Empedocles" and "Merope" are good examples of his more sober style of criticism. Like his own Apollo he is "young but intolerably severe," and, like Milton, he freely used, as in "The Strayed Reveller," verse in short unrhymed measures. Though these are distasteful to some critics, others, in Arnold's and Milton's employment of them, find grace and harmony so delightful that they do not regret the absence of rhyme. Arnold's rhymed verse is in simple old-fashioned forms, in lyrics and in the beautiful stanzas of two of his most beautiful poems, where majesty and sweetness meet, "The Scholar Gipsy," and "Thyrsis," an elegy on A. H. Clough, the friend of his Oxford days.

Never has the scenery around Oxford been so nobly celebrated; he makes classical "the stripling Thames," "Bablock Hythe," "the warm green-muffled Cumnor hills," "the Fyfield[Pg 588] tree," all the landscape through which Shelley wandered and left unsung. Thus Arnold has for Oxford men the same charm as Scott for Borderers; he is their own poet; and the pieces called "Switzerland" seem to recall a long vacation in the Alps. They are full of beauty in the descriptions of Nature and of Marguerite, a daughter of France, who seems to have inherited the charm of Manon Lescaut in the famous novel of the Abbé Prévost. For the rest, Arnold did not pen, or did not publish, sonnets to his mistress's eyebrow, and his lyrics reveal no more of his personality than his love of natural beauty, his delight in Nature, and a melancholy not unconnected with instability of religious belief; as in the flux and reflux of the sonorous lines in "Dover Beach," and "Yes, in the sea of life enisled". There are moments in youth (perhaps confined to Oxonians) when the grave charm of Arnold (as in the verses in the conclusion of "Sohrab and Rustum") seems the pearl highest of price in modern poetry. But in narrative, even in "Sohrab and Rustum" with its Homeric similes, still more in the narrative of "Tristram and Iseult," Arnold does not shine, and in "Merope" he certainly does not overstimulate. His "Forsaken Merman" is perhaps most admired by readers who are least delighted with the mass of his best poems, and least appreciative of "Requiescat," which is a worthy mate of the noblest "swallow flights of song" in the Greek Anthology, as hopeless and as beautiful as they. In his genius there was something Greek; there was nothing of frenzy and false excitement.

Arnold's criticism cannot always be termed "unaffected," and his manner and tone varied with the nature of the subject which he was discussing. It must be admitted that he "was not always wholly serious," and his banter, his "educated insolence" as Aristotle says, was apt rather to provoke than to convert people who differed from him, as to education, politics, social problems, or literature. But he had an unsurpassed skill in provoking discussion, and the public, which for long did not read him, became acquainted with his name, and his views through the newspapers. It is said that a meeting of persons connected with the Income Tax complained to him that his returns of his literary gains did not correspond with his immense literary reputation. He then,[Pg 589] with his habitual urbanity, catechized his catechizers. Had any one of them ever bought or read a book of his? Not one could answer in the affirmative; "So there, you see," he remarked.

His "Lectures on Translating Homer," delivered at Oxford when he was Professor of Poetry (1857-1867) are not only admirable expositions of Homeric art, and "the grand style," but rich in his peculiar vein of lofty irony and academic "chaff"—of a translator who did the "Iliad" into the metre of "Yankee Doodle". He advocated the use of English hexameters—which, indeed, would be excellent, if any one could write readable hexameters. His "Essays in Criticism" (1865) pleaded vainly for an Academy on the French model, for "ideas," and for culture, a term caught at and misapplied by feebler folk. His remarks on two unessential French writers illustrated his inability to appreciate the poetry as compared with the prose of France. He conceived, however, "of the whole group of civilized nations as being, for intellectual purposes, one great confederation... whose members have a due knowledge both of the past, out of which they all proceed, and of one another". He had the knowledge, though appreciation did not always accompany it, while the French, he complained, were almost wholly ignorant of his favourite Wordsworth. Yet, much as he rejoiced in Wordsworth's "criticism of life" (a favourite phrase), he admitted that, save in 1798-1808, the poet was devoid of inspiration, though "a great and powerful body of work remains," when the dross is cleared away. Generally, Arnold had a trick of taking a single line or two, perhaps of the worst, from a poet, using this inferior brick as a sample of the building, and contrasting it with specimens superlatively excellent from poets whom he wanted to extol. Thus he contrasted Théophile Gautier with Wordsworth, taking Théo as an inn on the road, and Wordsworth as a home eternal in the heavens. But surely we may tarry at an inn on our way and enjoy ourselves, though perhaps only one human being has seriously exclaimed: "I place Théophile only after Shakespeare". In this case the trick of setting a verse from Gautier beside a verse from Wordsworth was not played. After the appreciation of Wordsworth it is curious to find Arnold speaking of Molière[Pg 590] as "altogether a larger and more splendid luminary in the poetical heaven" than the Bard of Rydal, because the two authors are not in any way comparable with each other. The "high seriousness" in which Wordsworth is pre-eminent was indeed familiar to the comic author called "le Contemplateur," but the nature of his art did not permit him to hint at the existence of this quality, except in irony; while Lucretius, not, as in Wordsworth's case, Plato, was his favourite philosopher.

Arnold's eager curiosity led him into fields of which he had no first-hand knowledge, as in his delightful book on "The Study of Celtic Literature". We cannot assign all "natural magic" in poetry to the Celtic strain of blood in the population, and the peculiar wistfulness of old Gaelic and Welsh poetry may be found in Greek, Finnish, and even savage poetry. Though the book led others into much senseless writing, it is in itself full of revelations of beauty. Arnold was no Orientalist, and had no special knowledge of New Testament Greek, nor of the comparative study of religions. These defects, with surprising errors in taste, prevent his "St. Paul and Protestantism," "God and the Bible," and "Literature and Dogma" from reaching a high level in their way. But Arnold wrote beautiful prose, and wrote with that high sense of critical superiority which was his own, as it had been Dryden's. Both occasionally surprise, or even shock, by their idiosyncrasies, as do Dr. Johnson and Hazlitt; but they all delight and excite and instruct.

GENERAL WRITERS.

To the various and voluminous works of Mr. Ruskin, corresponding to every facet of his singular intellect and character, justice cannot possibly be done within our space. The son of a rich wine-merchant of Scottish extraction, he was born and bred among books and works of art, and, without attending any public school, entered Christ Church as a gentleman commoner. He won the Newdigate prize poem, and in 1843 published the first volume of his "Modern Painters". His primary object was to assert the supremacy of Turner, which involved him in a comparative study of art, modern, mediaeval and classical, and of the intellectual,[Pg 591] literary, social, and moral conditions of the societies in which the art, in each case, arose. He had also to observe Nature accurately, from the contour of the Alps to the development of the forms of trees, and, indeed, of "the meanest flower that blows". He drew excellently, and many of the copious and beautiful illustrations are from his own pencil. His own opinions, which, as he confessed, varied greatly at different times, were constantly exhibited, and he wrote in a style as highly pitched and coloured as that of De Quincey. The effect of the whole, at least on young readers, was immensely exciting and inspiriting, whatever the topic might be on which he expressed himself. His was the prose of a man who was almost a poet, but his verses proved to the world, as they must have done to himself, that formal poetry was not his forte. In art his affections were with les primitifs, the artists, holy and humble men of heart, before the Revival of learning, before Raphael; and he was actually fierce over Claude and Salvator Rosa. "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" (1849) and "The Stones of Venice" (1852) continued the teaching of "Modern Painters". In his "Academy Notes" his attitude was thus described by a painter in "Punch".

I sits and paints,
Hears no complaints,
I sells before I'm dry;
Comes savage Ruskin,
Puts his tusk in—
And nobody will buy.

Ruskin was extolling and defending the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Rossetti—whom he knew well, and bought from gladly—Millais, Holman Hunt, and others less celebrated, with whom were joined William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. They went back to the art of the Middle Ages, often applying its minute study of detail to incidents in modern life. The value of Ruskin's theories of art is now, and has long been, disputed. Ruskin was not an "impressionist," and the libel action brought against him by Whistler, characteristically appealing to a British jury on a question of art, and receiving one farthing of damages, left the questions open to each impartial[Pg 592] mind. Ruskin's socialistic theories, in "Unto This Last" have had infinitely more permanent and wide-reaching results than his ?sthetics. But, be these right or wrong, his early works are of the highest and most varied interest, both in matter and expression. There never was a man more rich in pity, and more open-handed, whether it was his pictures and other objects of art, or his money that he lavishly bestowed. In the sixties and later he produced many small books with pretty symbolical titles, dealing with all things from personal confessions to social problems: he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, where his lectures were crowded, and his "Fors Clavigera," an autobiography in numbers, came out in parts. It contains many examples of his style at its best, that is, at its simplest. One glorious passage gives a great Turneresque picture of a scene viewed from a certain bridge over Ettrick, whence, in fact, to mortal eyes no such prospect is visible! In "Fors" Ruskin wrote with great sympathy and affection about Sir Walter Scott.

In his later years and writings, the contradictions of his complicated character, and the effects of over-work, and too keen a vision of "the sad pageant of men's miseries," began to affect his work with eccentricity; and he sought retirement near Coniston Lake with his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Severn.

Of joy in widest commonalty spread,

of joy in art and Nature, he had made many thousands of people participators, for while others had written on art, none had done so with so much contagious enthusiasm, varied eloquence, and magnificent imagination. The rhythm of his style is almost as often invaded by blank verse, as in Dickens's case, and, according to R. L. Stevenson, an irruption of blank verse into prose is a symptom of great fatigue. In one short sentence of prose in Swinburne's essay on Lamb and Wither we read:—

Behind him and beneath we see....
The Hazlitts prattling at his heel,
The Dyces labouring in his wake.

Two other Oxford critics, Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) and John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) are so recently silent[Pg 593] that they cannot here be critically estimated. Both were devoted to literature and art, classical, modern, and of the Renaissance. Both had their peculiar styles, that of Symonds very animated, but somewhat Corinthian; that of Pater remarkable for a kind of hieratic precision, and sedulous daintiness, and a vocabulary in which certain favourite terms occurred but too frequently. Symonds sufflaminandus erat; in his "History of the Renaissance in Italy" he is certainly unable to keep the stream of his learning and enthusiasm within its banks; while an impatient reader might demand a more rapid and less obviously self-conscious movement in the style of Pater. His first volume, "Studies in the History of the Renaissance" (1873), brought to young readers the same kind of pleasant surprise as "The Defence of Guenevere" or "Atalanta in Calydon". The essay on Coleridge, and the "little poem in prose" on the Monna Lisa of Leonardo, appeared to be new models of excellence. This book remains the most characteristic of the author, though he seems to have thought that his style verged perilously on that of poetry. He avoided this possible danger, without ceasing "still to be neat, still to be dressed," in his reflective novel of Roman life, "Marius the Epicurean" (1885), in which Marius is far from being an Epicurean in the vulgar sense of the word, but is rather the John Inglesant of the period. The book, like "Clarissa Harlowe," is not to be read so much for the story as for the delicate dreamy succession of the moods, and of the inclinations and half-beliefs of the hero, and for the pictures of the manners of the age. "Plato and Platonism" is a valuable study, and "Imaginary Portraits" shows more imagination in the designing of character than Marius. The reef which he and R. L. Stevenson did not always steer clear of was préciosité, over-anxious effort towards novelty and perfection of phrase.

[1] See "English Conspiracy and Dissent, 1660-1674," by Professor Wilbur C. Abbott, "American Historical Review," April, July, 1909.

[2] The Simpsons produced ministers in every generation from 1560 to 1730, when one of them fell into heresy.

[3] Vol. IV, p. 134, "To Whittier".

[4] Professor W. P. Trent.