Chapter VI

THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD

The second period of English poetry in the nineteenth century displays a variety and abundance of poetical accomplishment which must rank it very little below either its immediate predecessor, or even the great so-called Elizabethan era. But it is distinguished from both these periods, and, indeed, from almost all others by the extraordinary predominance of a single poet in excellence, in influence, and in duration. There is probably no other instance anywhere of a poet who for more than sixty years wrote better poetry than any one of his contemporaries who were not very old men when he began, and for exactly fifty of those years was recognised by the best judges as the chief poet of his country if not of his time.

Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809 at Somersby, in Lincolnshire, where his father, a member of a good county family, was rector. He was the third son, and his two elder brothers, Frederick and Charles, both possessed considerable poetical gifts, though it cannot be said that the Poems by Two Brothers (it seems that it should really have been "three"), which appeared in 1826, display much of this or anything whatever of Alfred's subsequent charm. From the Grammar School of Louth the poet went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was contemporary, and in most cases intimate, with an unusually distinguished set of undergraduates, many of whom afterwards figured in the famous Sterling Club (see chapter iv). He also did what not many great future poets have done, he obtained the Chancellor's prize for English verse with a poem on "Timbuctoo," where again his special note is almost, though perhaps not quite, absent: it appears faintly and fitfully in another juvenile poem not formally published till long afterwards, "The Lover's Tale."

It was in 1830 that he made his first substantive appearance with a book of Poems. This volume was afterwards subjected to a severe handling by the poet in the way of revision and omission—processes which through life he continued with such perseverance and rigour, that the final critical edition of him, when it appears, will be one of the most complicated of the kind in English literature. So did he also with another which appeared two years (or a little more) later. It is not therefore quite just to judge the criticism which these books received, by the present condition of the poems which figured in them; for though most of the beauties were there then, they were accompanied by many defects which are not there now. Criticism, however, was undoubtedly unfavourable, and even unfair. Although Tennyson was not, either at this time or at any other, a party politician, the two great Tory periodicals, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine, were still animated, the former by a dislike to the Romantic school in poetry, the latter by a dislike to "Cockneys"—though how anybody could have discovered a Cockney in Tennyson may seem marvellous enough. Accordingly Lockhart in the one and Wilson in the other fell foul (though in Wilson's case, at least, not indiscriminately) of work which beyond all question offered very numerous and very convenient handles, in ways which will be mentioned presently, to merely carping criticism. Some attempts at reply were made by the poet's friends, notably A. H. Hallam, but the public did not take to him, and even well-affected and competent older judges, such as Coleridge, expressed very qualified admiration.

But during the next decade, in which he gave himself up silently to the task of perfecting his art, attempting no profession or literary occupation of profit, and living (partly in London, partly in the country at High Beach and elsewhere) with extreme simplicity and economy on his own small means and a pension which was provided for him, the leaven of an almost fanatical admiration was spreading among readers of his own age or a little younger. And his next publication, a new issue of Poems in 1842—containing the final selection and revision of the others already mentioned, and a large reinforcement of admirable work—was received, not indeed with the popular avidity which had been displayed towards Scott and Byron in the generation before, and which revived in the case of his own later work, but with an immense enjoyment by almost all true lovers of poetry. Even Wordsworth, the most ungracious critic of other men's work in his own art of whom the history of literature gives record, acknowledged Tennyson in the amplest terms.

This was, as has been hinted above, exactly fifty years before his death, and though in the first of these five decades the pudding if not the praise was still rather scanty, his reputation waxed steadily and never waned. To keep for the present to chronicle in biography and bibliography, he published in 1847 the exquisite "medley" of The Princess, his first attempt at a poem of any length. 1850 was a great year in his career, for in it he published the collection of elegiacs on his friend Arthur Hallam, in which some have seen his most perfect work, and he became Poet Laureate. Three years later he bought a house at Farringford, near Freshwater in the Isle of Wight, which was for the rest of his life his occasional and, until 1870 (when to avoid intrusion he built himself another at Aldworth near Haslemere), his main house. His poetry now was beginning to bring in some profit, the editions of it multiplying every year; and during the last thirty years of his life, if not more, he was probably at least as richly provided with mere gold as any poet has ever been. He was, however, never seduced into hasty writing; and he never gave himself to any other occupation save poetry, while during his entire life he was a hater of what is commonly called society. In 1855 there appeared Maud, the reception of which seemed at first something of a relapse in welcome, which was in its first form open to some criticism, and which he touched up to one of the finest as a whole, as it was in parts one of the most passionate and melodious of his works. But the Idylls of the King, the first and best instalment of which appeared in 1858, completely revived even his popular vogue, and made him indeed popular as no poet had been since Byron. It was said at the time that 17,000 copies of Enoch Arden, his next volume (1864), were sold on the morning of publication.

For the rest of his life his issues were pretty frequent, though the individual volumes were never large. A series of dramas beginning with Queen Mary in 1875, and continuing through Harold, The Falcon, The Cup, the unlucky Promise of May, Becket, and The Foresters, though fine enough for any other man, could be better spared by his critical admirers than any other portion of his works. But the volumes of poems proper, which appeared between 1864 and his death, Lucretius, Tiresias, the successive instalments of the Idylls, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, Demeter, The Death of [OE]none, and perhaps above all the splendid Ballads of 1880, never failed to contain with matter necessarily of varying excellence things altogether incomparable—one of the last, the finest and fortunately also the most popular, being the famous "Crossing the Bar," which appeared in his penultimate, but last not posthumous, volume in 1889. He died at Aldworth in October 1892, and was buried with an unequalled solemnity in Westminster Abbey.

In the case of no English poet is it more important and interesting than in the case of Tennyson, considering the excellence of his own work in the first place, and the altogether unparalleled extent of his influence in the second, to trace the nature and character of his poetical quality. Nor is this difficult, though strange to say it has not always been done. In his very earliest work, so soon as this quality appeared at all, it is to be discovered side by side with other things which are not native. Undoubtedly the tradition which, in the general filiation of English poetry, connects Tennyson with Keats, is not wholly wrong. In many of the weaker things, and not a few of the better, of the volumes of 1830 and 1832, there is to be seen both the wonderful music which Keats attained by a combination of the classical and romantic appeals—the appeals which in his own case are singly exhibited at their best in the "Grecian Urn" and in "La Belle Dame sans Merci,"—and the sometimes faulty and illegitimate means which Keats took to produce this effect. But to any one who compares rationally (and it may be permitted to remark parenthetically, that nothing seems to be more misunderstood than the comparative point of view) the difference between Keats and Tennyson will emerge at once. Both being great poets, there is the inexplicable in both; while as Keats undoubtedly died before he had any chance of applying to his own powers and products the unequalled process of clarifying and self-criticism which went on with Tennyson in the ten years' silence between the second of the volumes just mentioned and his issue of 1842, it is impossible to say that Keats himself could not have done something similar. Nothing that he ever did is worse in point of "gush," of undisciplined fluency, of mistakes in point of taste and of other defects than the notorious piece about "the darling little room," on which the future Poet Laureate's critics were so justly severe; while in the single point of passion it is very doubtful whether Tennyson ever approached the author of "La Belle Dame sans Merci." There was not perhaps much to choose between the two in their natural power of associating pictorial with musical expression; while both had that gift of simple humanity, of plain honest healthy understanding of common things, the absence of which gives to Shelley—in some ways a greater poet than either of them—a certain unearthliness and unreality.

But Tennyson had from the first a wider range of interest and capacity than Keats, and he had the enormous advantage of thorough and regular literary training. No poet ever improved his own work as Tennyson did; nor has any, while never allowing his genius to be daunted by self-comparison with his predecessors, had such a faculty of availing himself of what they had done without copying, of seeing what they had not done and supplying the gap himself. And besides this he had the inexplicable, the incommunicable, the unique, the personal gift. In the very earliest things, in "Claribel," in "Mariana," in the "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," in the "Ode to Memory," in the "Dirge," in the "Dying Swan," in "Oriana," there is even to those who were born long after they were written, even to those who have for years sedulously compared them with almost all things before and with all things since, the unmistakable note of the new, of the new that never can be old. It is there in the rhythms, it is there in the phrase. The poet may take things that had previously existed—the Keatsian and Shelleian lyric, the Wordsworthian attitude to Nature, the Miltonic blank verse; but inevitably, invariably, each under his hands becomes different, becomes individual and original. The result cannot be accounted for by mannerisms, from which at no time was Tennyson free, and after the thousands and ten thousands of imitations which have been seen since, it stands out untouched, unrivalled.

In the next instalment this quality of intense poetical individuality strengthened and deepened. As we read "The Two Voices," "[OE]none," "The Palace of Art," "The Lotos Eaters," "A Dream of Fair Women," it becomes almost incomprehensible how any one who ever read them even in forms less perfect than those that we possess, should have mistaken their incomparable excellence. But the student of literary history knows better. He knows that nearly always the poet has to create his audience, that he sings before the dawn of the day in which he is to be sovereign.

And then with the 1842 book came practically the completion of Tennyson in the sense of the indication of his powers. Edward FitzGerald, as is elsewhere noticed, thought, or at least said, that everything his friend had done after this was more or less a declension. This is a common and not an ignoble Fallacy of Companionship—the delusion of those who have hailed and accompanied a poet or a prophet in his early struggles. It is not even wholly a fallacy, inasmuch as, in the case of the class of poets to which Tennyson belongs, there does come a time when the rest of the products of their genius is so to speak applied: it ceases to reveal them in new aspects. They do not repeat themselves; but they chiefly vary. Now came the magnificent "Morte D'Arthur" (the "Idylls of the King" in microcosm, with all their merits and none of their defects), "St. Simeon Stylites," "Ulysses," "Locksley Hall," "St. Agnes' Eve," and other exquisite things; while to this period, as the subsequent arrangement shows, belong not a few, such as "Tithonus" and "The Voyage," which were not actually published till later, and in which keen observers at the time of their publication detected as it were an older ring, a more genuine and unblended vintage.

It is not improper therefore to break off here for a moment and to endeavour to state—leaving out the graces that can never be stated, and are more important than all the others—the points in which this new excellence of Tennyson differed from the excellences of his forerunners. One of them, not the least important, but the least truly original, because something distantly resembling it had been seen before in Keats and Shelley, is the combined application of pictorial and musical handling. Not, of course, that all poets had not endeavoured to depict their subjects vividly and to arrange the picture in a melodious frame of sound, not that the best of them had not also endeavoured to convey, if it were possible, the colours into the sense, the sense into the music. But partly as a result of the natural development and acquired practice of the language, partly for the very reason that the arts both of painting and music had themselves made independent progress, most of all, perhaps, because Tennyson was the first poet in English of the very greatest genius who dared not to attempt work on the great scale, but put into short pieces (admitting, of course, of infinite formal variety) what most of his forerunners would have spun into long poems—the result here is, as a rule, far in advance of those forerunners in this respect, and as an exception on a level with the very best of their exceptions. With Shakespeare there is no comparison; Shakespeare can send to every poet an "O of Giotto" in his own style to which that poet must bow. But of others only Spenser had hitherto drawn such pictures as those of the "Palace" and the "Dream," and Spenser had done them in far less terse fashion than Tennyson. Only Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Blake, perhaps Beddoes, and a few Elizabethans had poured into the veins of language the ineffable musical throb of a score of pieces from "Claribel" to "Break! Break!" and not one of them had done it in quite the same way. Only Milton, with Thomson as a far distant second, had impressed upon non-dramatic blank verse such a swell and surge as that of "[OE]none." And about all these different kinds and others there clung and rang a peculiar dreamy slow music which was heard for the first time, and which has never been reproduced,—a music which in "The Lotos Eaters," impossible as it might have seemed, adds a new charm after the Faerie Queen, after the Castle of Indolence, after the Revolt of Islam to the Spenserian stanza, which makes the stately verses of the "Palace" and the "Dream" tremble and cry with melodious emotion, and which accomplishes the miracle of the poet's own dying swan in a hundred other poems all "flooded over with eddying song."

But there is something more to be noted still. The poet had caught and was utilising the spirit of his time in two ways, one of them almost entirely new. That he constantly sang the subjective view of nature may be set down to the fact that he came after Wordsworth, though the fact that he sang it without the Wordsworthian dryness and dulness must be set down to his own credit. But in that sense of the history of former times which is perhaps the chief glory of the nineteenth century in matters of thought he had been anticipated by no one. He might not have attained it without Scott and Byron, but his expression of it was hardly conditioned in the very slightest degree by the expression either of Byron or of Scott. They were not in strictness men of the nineteenth century; he was, and he represented the very best features of his time in attending, from its point of view mainly, to the features of better times.

But if FitzGerald's dictum were taken in the sense that Tennyson's poetical career might, with advantage or with anything but the greatest possible loss, have been closed in 1842, then certainly it would be something more than a crotchet. Nothing perhaps appeared subsequently (with unimportant exceptions such as the plays, and as the dialect pieces of which the "Northern Farmer" was the first and best) the possibility of which could not have been divined from the earlier work. The tree had blossomed; it had almost, to keep up the metaphor, set; but by far the greater part of the fruit was yet to ripen, and very much of it was to be of quality not inferior, of quantity far greater, than anything that had yet been given.

The Princess and In Memoriam, the two first-fruits of this later crop, were certainly not the least important. Indeed they may be said to have shown for the first time that the poet was capable of producing, in lighter and severer styles respectively, work not limited to short flights and exemplifying what (perhaps mistakenly) is called "thought," as well as style and feeling, colour and music. The Princess is undoubtedly Tennyson's greatest effort, if not exactly in comedy, in a vein verging towards the comic—a side on which he was not so well equipped for offence or for defence as on the other. But it is a masterpiece. Exquisite as its author's verse always is, it was never more exquisite than here, whether in blank verse or in the (superadded) lyrics, while none of his deliberately arranged plays contains characters half so good as those of the Princess herself, of Lady Blanche and Lady Psyche, of Cyril, of the two Kings, and even of one or two others. And that unequalled dream-faculty of his, which has been more than once glanced at, enabled him to carry off whatever was fantastical in the conception with almost unparalleled felicity. It may or may not be agreed that the question of the equality of the sexes is one of the distinguishing questions of this century; and some of those who would give it that position may or may not maintain, if they think it worth while, that it is treated here too lightly, while their opponents may wish that it had been treated more lightly still. But this very difference will point the unbiassed critic to the same conclusion, that Tennyson has hit the golden mean; while that, whatever he has hit or missed in subject, the verse of his essay is golden, no one who is competent will doubt. Such lyrics as "The splendour falls" and "Tears, idle tears," such blank verse as that of the closing passage, would raise to the topmost heights of poetry whatever subject it was spent upon.

In Memoriam attacked two subjects in the main,—the one perennial, the other of the time,—just as The Princess had done. The perennial, which is often but another, if not an exclusive, word for the poetical, was in the first case aspirant and happy love, in the other mourning friendship. The ephemeral was, in the latter, the sort of half doubting religiosity which has occupied so much of the thought of our day. On this latter point, as on the other just mentioned and on most beside, the attitude of Tennyson was "Liberal-Conservatism" (if political slang may be generalised), inclining always to the Conservative rather than to the Liberal side, but giving Liberalism a sufficient footing and hearing. Here again opinions may be divided; and here again those who think that in poetry the mere fancies of the moment are nothing may be disposed to pay little attention to the particular fancies which have occupied the poet. But here again the manner, as always with real poets, carries off, dissolves, annihilates the special matter for poetical readers. Tennyson had here taken (not invented) a remarkable and not frequently used stanza, the iambic dimeter quatrain with the rhymes not alternated, but arranged a b b a. It is probable that if a well-instructed critic had been asked beforehand what would be the effect of this employed with a certain monotone of temper and subject in a book of some three thousand lines or so, he would have shaken his head and hinted that the substantive would probably justify its adjective and the monotone become monotonous. And if he had been really a deacon in his craft he would have added: "But to a poet there is nothing impossible." The difficulty was no impossibility to Tennyson. He has not only, in the rather more than six score poems of this wonderful book, adjusted his medium to a wide range of subjects, all themselves adjusted to the general theme, but he has achieved that poetic miracle, the communication to the same metre and to no very different scheme of phrase of an infinite variety of interior movement. There is scarcely a bad line in In Memoriam; there are few lines that do not contain a noble thought, a passionate sentiment, a beautiful picture; but there is nothing greater about it than the way in which, side by side with the prevailing undertone of the stanza, the individual pieces vary the music and accompany it, so to speak, in duet with a particular melody. It must have been already obvious to good ears that no greater master of English harmonics—perhaps that none so great—had ever lived; but In Memoriam set the fact finally and irrevocably on record.

Maud was the third, and perhaps it may be said to have been, on a great scale, the last experiment in thus combining the temporal with the eternal. It was also probably the weakest as a whole, though the poet had never done more poetical things than the passage beginning, "Cold and clear-cut face"; than the prothalamium, never to have its due sequel, "I have led her home"; than the incomparable and never-to-be-hackneyed "Come into the garden"; or than the best of all, "Oh! that 'twere possible." It may even be contended that if it were ever allowable to put the finger down and say, "Here is the highest," these, and not the best things of the 1842 volumes, are the absolute summit of the poet's effort, the point which, though he was often near it, he never again quite reached. But the piece, as a whole, is certainly less of a success, less smooth and finished as it comes from its own lathe, than either The Princess or In Memoriam. It looks too like an essay in competition with the "Spasmodic School" of its own day; it drags in merely casual things—adulteration, popular politics, and ephemera of all kinds—too assiduously, and its characterisations are not happy. There is a tradition that the poet met a critic, and a very accomplished critic too, who was one of his own oldest friends, and said, "What do you mean by calling Maud vulgar?" "I didn't," said the critic, quite truly. "No, but you meant it," growled Tennyson. And there was something of a confession in the growl.

But these slight relapses (and, after all, what sort of a relapse is it which gives us not merely the incomparable things referred to, but others hardly less exquisite?) never, in the great writers, serve as anything but retreats before an advance; and certainly, in a sense, the Idylls of the King were an advance, though not, perhaps, in all senses. No total so brilliant, so varied within a certain general unity, so perfectly polished in style, so cunningly adjusted to meet the popular without disappointing the critical ear, had ever come from Tennyson's pen as the first quartet of Idylls, Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere. No such book of English blank verse, with the doubtful exception of the Seasons, had been seen since Milton. Nothing more adroitly selected than the contrast of the four special pieces—a contrast lost to those who only read them in the completed Arthuriad—has been often attempted or ever achieved. It is true that the inner faithful, the sacred band of Tennysonians, old and young, grumbled a little that polish had been almost too much attended to; that there was a certain hardish mannerism, glittering but cold, about the style; that there was noticeable a certain compromise in the appeal, a certain trimming of the sail to the popular breeze. These criticisms were not entirely without foundation, and they were more justified than their authors could know by the later instalments of the poem, which, the latest not published till twenty-seven years afterwards, rounded it off to its present bulk of twelve books, fifteen separate pieces, and over ten thousand lines. Another, more pedantic in appearance, but not entirely destitute of weight, was that which urged that in handling the Arthurian story the author had, so to speak, "bastardised it," and had given neither mediæval nor modern sentiment or colouring, but a sort of amalgamation of both. Yet the charm of the thing was so great, and the separate passages were so consummate, that even critics were loth to quarrel with such a gift.

The later instalments of the poem—some of them, as has been said, very much later, but still so closely connected as to be best noticed here—were of somewhat less even excellence. It was an inevitable, but certainly an unfortunate thing, that the poet republished the magnificent early fragment above noticed in a setting which, fine as it would have been for any one else, was inferior to this work of the very best time. Some of the lighter passages, as in Gareth and Lynette, showed less grace than their forerunners in The Princess; and in Pelleas and Ettarre and Balin and Balan the poet sometimes seemed to be attempting alien moods which younger poets than himself had made their own. But the best passages of some of these later Idylls, notably those of The Holy Grail and The Last Tournament, were among the finest, not merely of the book, but of the poet. Nowhere has he caught the real, the best, spirit of the legends he followed more happily; nowhere has he written more magnificent verse than in Percivale's account of his constantly baffled quest and of Lancelot's visit to the "enchanted towers of Carbonek."

Far earlier than these, Enoch Arden and its companion poems were something more of a return to the scheme of the earlier books—no very long single composition, but a medley of blank verse pieces and lyrics, the former partly expansions of the scheme of the earlier "English Idyll," the latter various and generally beautiful; one or two, such as "In the Valley of Cauterets," of the most beautiful. Here, too, were some interesting translations, with the dialect pieces above referred to; and all the later volumes, except those containing the plays, preserved this mixed manner. Their contents are too numerous for many to be mentioned here. Only in the Ballads and Other Poems was something like a distinctly new note struck in the two splendid patriotic pieces on "The Last Fight of the Revenge" and the "Defence of Lucknow," which, even more than the poet's earlier "Charge of the Light Brigade," deserve the title of the best English war-songs since Campbell; in "Rizpah," an idyll of a sterner and more tragic kind than anything he had previously attempted; and in the "Voyage of Maeldune," this last in some respects the most interesting of the whole. For the marvellous power which great poets possess of melting, of "founding," so to speak, minor styles and kinds of poetry to their own image, while not losing a certain character of the original, has never been shown better than here. Attention had, even before the date of this poem, been drawn to the peculiar character of early Celtic poetry,—-not the adulterated style of Ossian, but the genuine method of the old Irish singers. And, since, a whole band of young and very clever writers have set themselves, with a mixture of political and poetical enthusiasm, the task of reviving these notes if possible. They have rarely succeeded in getting very close to them without mere archaic pastiche. Tennyson in this poem carried away the whole genius of the Celtic legend, infused it into his own verse, branded it with his own seal, and yet left the character of the vintage as unmistakable as if he had been an Irishman of the tenth century, instead of an Englishman of the nineteenth. And indeed there are no times, or countries, or languages in the kingdom of poetry.

A very little more may, perhaps, still be said about this great poet,—great in the character and variety of his accomplishment, in the volume of it, and, above all, in the extraordinarily sustained quality of his genius and the length of time during which it dominated and pervaded the literature of his country. The influences of Pope and Dryden were weak in force and merely external in effect, the influence of Byron was short-lived, that of Wordsworth was partial and limited, in comparison with the influence of Tennyson. Of this, as of a mere historical fact, there can be no dispute among those who care to inform themselves of the facts and to consider them coolly. Of his intrinsic merit, as opposed to his influential importance, it is not of course possible to speak so peremptorily. Among the great volume of more or less unfavourable criticism which such a career was sure to call forth, two notes perhaps were the most dominant, the most constant, and (even fervent admirers may admit) the least unjust. He was accused of a somewhat excessive prettiness, a sort of dandyism and coquetry in form, and of a certain want of profundity in matter. The last charge is the more unprofitable in discussion, for it turns mainly on vast and vague questions of previous definition. "What is thought?" "What is profundity?" a by no means jesting demurrer may object, and he will not soon be cleared out of the way. And it will perhaps seem to some that what is called Tennyson's lack of profundity consists only in a disinclination on his part to indulge in what the Germans call the Schwätzerei, the endless, aimless talkee-talkee about "thoughtful" things in which the nineteenth century has indulged beyond the record of any since what used to be called the Dark Ages. On the real "great questions" Tennyson was not loth to speak, and spoke gravely enough; even to the ephemeralities, as we have said, he paid rather too much than too little attention. But he did not go into the ins and outs of them as some of his contemporaries did, and as other contemporaries thought fitting. He usually neglected the negligible; and perhaps it would not hurt him with posterity if he had neglected it a little more, though it hurt him a little with contemporaries that he neglected it as much as he did.

The charge of prettiness is to be less completely ruled out; though it shows even greater mistake in those who do more than touch very lightly on it. In the earliest forms of the earlier poems not seldom, and occasionally in even the latest forms of the later, the exquisiteness of the poet's touch in music and in painting, in fancy and in form, did sometimes pass into something like finicalness, into what is called in another language mignardise. But this was only the necessary, and, after he was out of his apprenticeship, the minimised effect of his great poetical quality—that very quality of exquisiteness in form, in fancy, in painting, and in music which has just been stated. We have, it must be admitted, had greater poets than Tennyson. Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Shelley, undoubtedly deserve this preference to him; Wordsworth and Keats may deserve it. But we have had none so uniformly, and over such a large mass of work, exquisite. In the lighter fantastic veins he may sometimes be a little unsure in touch and taste; in satire and argument a little heavy, a little empty, a little rhetorical; in domestic and ethical subjects a little tame. But his handlings of these things form a very small part of his work. And in the rest none of all these faults appears, and their absence is due to the fact that nothing interferes with the exquisite perfection of the form. Some faults have been found with Tennyson's rhymes, though this is generally hypercriticism; and in his later years he was a little too apt to accumulate tribrachs in his blank verse, a result of a mistaken sense of the true fact that he was better at slow rhythms than at quick, and of an attempt to cheat nature. But in all other respects his versification is by far the most perfect of any English poet, and results in a harmony positively incomparable. So also his colour and outline in conveying the visual image are based on a study of natural fact and a practice in transferring it to words which are equally beyond comparison. Take any one of a myriad of lines of Tennyson, and the mere arrangement of vowels and consonants will be a delight to the ear; let any one of a thousand of his descriptions body itself before the eye, and the picture will be like the things seen in a dream, but firmer and clearer.

Although, as has been said, the popularity of Lord Tennyson itself was not a plant of very rapid growth, and though but a short time before his position was undisputed it was admitted only by a minority, imposing in quality but far from strong in mere numbers, his chief rival during the latter part of their joint lives was vastly slower in gaining the public ear. It is not quite pleasant to think that the well-merited but comparatively accidental distinction of the Laureateship perhaps did more even for Tennyson in this respect than the intrinsic value of his work. Robert Browning had no such aid, his verse was even more abhorrent than Tennyson's to the tradition of the elders, and until he found a sort of back-way to please, he was even more indifferent to pleasing. So that while Tennyson became in a manner popular soon after 1850, two decades more had to pass before anything that could be called popularity came to Browning. It is, though the actual dates are well enough known to most people, still something of a surprise to remember that at that time he had been writing for very nearly forty years, and that his first book, though a little later than Tennyson's, actually appeared before the death of Coleridge and not more than a few months after that of Scott. Browning, about whose ancestry and parentage a good deal of mostly superfluous ink has been shed, was born, the son of a city man, on 7th May 1812, in the, according to the elder Mr. Weller, exceptional district of Camberwell. He was himself exceptional enough in more ways than one. His parents had means; but Browning did not receive the ordinary education of a well-to-do Englishman at school and college, and his learning, though sufficiently various, was privately obtained. Pauline, his first poem, appeared in 1833, but had been written about two years earlier. He did not reprint it in the first general collection of his verse, nor till after his popularity had been established; and it cannot be said to be of great intrinsic excellence. But it was distinctly characteristic:—first, in a strongly dramatic tone and strain without regular dramatic form; secondly, in a peculiar fluency of decasyllabic verse that could not be directly traced to any model; and, thirdly, in a certain quality of thought, which in later days for a long time received, and never entirely lost from the vulgar, the name of "obscurity," but which perhaps might be more justly termed breathlessness—the expression, if not the conception, of a man who either did not stop at all to pick his words, or was only careful to pick them out of the first choice that presented itself to him of something not commonplace.

In Pauline, however, there is little positive beauty. In the next book, Paracelsus (1835), there is a great deal. Here the dramatic form was much more definite, though still not attempting acted or actable drama. The poet's appetite for "soul-dissection" was amply shown in the characters not merely of Paracelsus himself, but of his soberer friends Festus and Michal, and of the Italian poet Aprile, a sort of Euphorion pretty evidently suggested by, though greatly enlarged from, the actual Euphorion of the second part of Faust, then not long finished. The rapid, breathless blank verse, the crowding rush of simile and illustration, and the positive plethora of meaning, more often glanced and hinted at than fully worked out, were as noteworthy as before in kind, and as much more so in degree as in scale. Here too were lyrics, not anticipating the full splendour of the poet's later lyrical verse, but again quite original. Here, in fact, to anybody who chose to pay attention, was a real "new poet" pretty plainly announced.

Very few did choose to pay attention; and Browning's next attempt was not of a kind to conciliate halting or hostile opinion, though it might please the initiated. He wrote for his friend Macready a play intended at least to be of the regular acting kind. This play, Strafford (1837), contains fine things; but the involution and unexpectedness of the poet's thought now and always showed themselves least engagingly when they were even imagined as being spoken not read. After yet another three years Sordello followed, and here the most peculiar but the least estimable side of the author's genius attained a prominence not elsewhere equalled, till in his latest stage he began to parody himself, and scarcely even then. Although this book does not deserve the disgusted contempt which used to be poured on it, though it contains many noble passages, and as the "story of a soul" is perfectly intelligible to moderate intellects, it must have occasioned some doubts and qualms to intelligent admirers of the poet as to whether he would lose himself in the paths on which he was entering. Such doubts must have been soon set at rest by the curious medley issued in parts, under the general title of Bells and Pomegranates, between 1841 and 1846. The plays here, though often striking and showing that the author's disabilities, though never likely to leave, were also not likely to master him, showed also, with the possible exception of the charming nondescript of Pippa Passes, no new or positively unexpected faculty. But certain shorter things, lyrical and other, at last made it clear that Browning could sing as well as say: and from this time, 1846 (which also was the year of his marriage with Miss Elizabeth Barrett), he could claim rank as a great poet. He had been hitherto more or less a wanderer, but with headquarters in England; he now went to Florence, which in turn was his headquarters till his wife's death in 1861. His publications during the time were only two—Christmas Eve and Easter Day in 1850, and Men and Women in 1855. But these were both masterpieces. He never did better work, and, with Bells and Pomegranates and Dramatis Personæ, which appeared in 1864 (when, after Mrs. Browning's death, he had returned to London), they perhaps contain all his very best work.

Up to this time, the thirty-first year from the publication of Pauline, Browning's work, though by no means scanty, could hardly be called voluminous as the result of half a lifetime of absolute leisure. A little before Dramatis Personæ—itself not a long book, though of hardly surpassed quality—the whole of the poems except Pauline had been gathered into three small but thick volumes, which undoubtedly did very much to spread the poet's fame—a spread much helped by their immediate successors. The enormous poem of The Ring and the Book, originally issued in four volumes and containing more than twenty thousand verses, was published in 1869, and, the public being by this time well prepared for it, received a welcome not below its merits. Having at last gained the public ear, Mr. Browning did not fail to improve the occasion, and of the next fifteen years few passed without a volume, while some saw two, from his pen. These, including translations of the Alcestis and the Agamemnon (for the poet was at this time seized with a great fancy for Greek, which he rendered with much fluency and a very singular indulgence in a sort of hybrid and pedantic spelling of proper names), were Balaustion's Adventure and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Fifine at the Fair (1872), Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), Aristophanes' Apology and The Inn Album (1875), Pacchiarotto and how he Worked in Distemper (1876), La Saisiaz (1878), Dramatic Idylls, two volumes (1879-80), Jocoseria (1883), and Ferishtah's Fancies (1884). The five remaining years of Browning's long life were somewhat less fruitful; but Parleyings with Certain People of Importance came in 1887, and at the end of 1889, almost simultaneously with his death in Italy, Asolando, which some think by far his best volume since Dramatis Personæ, a quarter of a century older. These volumes occasionally contained a few, and Asolando contained several, of the lovely lyrics above referred to. But the great bulk of them consisted of the curious blank verse, now narrative, now ostensibly dramatic monologue, which the poet had always affected, and which he now seemed to affect more and more. In them, too, from The Ring and the Book onwards, there appeared a tendency stronger than ever to an eccentric and almost burlesque phraseology, which at one time threatened to drown all his good qualities, as involution of thought had threatened to drown them in the Sordello period. But this danger also was averted at the last.

Critical estimate of Browning's poetry was for years hampered by, and cannot even yet be said to have been quite cleared from, the violent prepossessions of public opinion respecting him. For more than a generation, in the ordinary sense, he was more or less passionately admired by a few devotees, stupidly or blindly ignored by the public in general, and persistently sneered at, lectured, or simply disliked by the majority of academically educated critics. The sharp revulsion of his later years has been noticed; and it amounted almost to this, that while dislike to him in those who had intelligently, if somewhat narrowly, disapproved of his ways was not much affected, a Browning cultus, almost as blind as the former pooh-poohing or ignoring, set in, and extended from a considerable circle of ardent worshippers to the public at large. A "Browning Society" was founded in 1881, and received from the poet a kind of countenance which would certainly not have been extended to it by most English men of letters. During his later years handbooks solemnly addressed to neophytes in Browningism, as if the cult were a formal science or art, appeared with some frequency; and there has been even a bulky Browning Dictionary, which not only expounds the more recondite (and, it is fair to say, tolerably frequent) allusions of the master, but provides for his disciples something to make up for the ordinary classical and other dictionaries with which, it seemed to be presumed, their previous education would have made them little conversant.

This not very wise adulation in its turn not unnaturally excited a sort of irritation and dislike, to a certain extent renewing the old prejudice in a new form. To those who could discard extraneous considerations and take Browning simply as he was, he must, from a period which only very old men can now remember, have always appeared a very great, though also a very far from perfect poet. His imperfections were always on the surface, though perhaps they were not always confined to it; and only uncritical partisanship could at any time have denied them, while some of them became noticeably worse in the period of rapid composition or publication from 1870 to 1885. A large license of unconventionality, and even of defiance of convention, may be claimed by, and should be allowed to, persons of genius such as Mr. Browning undoubtedly possessed. But it can hardly be denied that he, like his older contemporary Carlyle, whose example may not have been without influence upon him, did set at naught not merely the traditions, but the sound norms and rules of English phrase to a rather unnecessary extent. A beginning of deliberate provocation and challenge, passing into an after-period of more or less involuntary persistence in an exaggeration of the mannerisms at first more or less deliberately adopted, is apt to be shown by persons who set themselves in this way to innovate; and it was shown by Mr. Browning. It is impossible for any intelligent admirer to maintain, except as a paradox, that his strange modulations, his cacophonies of rhythm and rhyme, his occasional adoption of the foreshortened language of the telegraph or the comic stage, and many other peculiarities of his, were not things which a more perfect art would have either absorbed and transformed, or at least have indulged in with far less luxuriance. Nor does it seem much more reasonable for anybody to contend that his fashion of soul-dissection at a hand-gallop, in drama, in monologue, in lay sermon, was not largely, even grossly, abused. Sometimes the thing was not worth doing at all—there are at least half a dozen of the books between The Ring and the Book and Asolando from the whole of which a judicious lover of poetry would not care to save more than the bulk of the smallest of them should they be menaced with entire destruction. Even in the best of these what is good could generally, if not always, have been put at the length of the shorter Men and Women with no loss, nay, with great advantage. The obscurity so much talked of was to some extent from the very first, and to the last continued to be, in varying degrees, an excuse, or at least an occasion, for putting at great length thought that was not always so far from commonplace as it looked into expression which was very often not so much original as unkempt. "Less matter with more art" was the demand which might have been made of Mr. Browning from first to last, and with increasing instance as he became more popular.

But though no competent lover of poetry can ever have denied the truth and cogency of these objections, the admission of them can never, in any competent lover of poetry, have obscured or prevented an admiration of Browning none the less intense because not wholly unreserved. Even his longer poems, in which his faults were most apparent, possessed an individuality of the first order, combined the intellectual with no small part of the sensual attraction of poetry after a fashion not otherwise paralleled in England since Dryden, and provided an extraordinary body of poetical exercise and amusement. The pathos, the power, at times the humour, of the singular soul-studies which he was so fond of projecting with little accessory of background upon his canvas, could not be denied, and have not often been excelled. If he was not exactly what is commonly called orthodox in religion, and if his philosophy was of a distinctly vague order, he was always "on the side of the angels" in theology, in metaphysics, in ethics; and his politics, if exceedingly indistinct and unpractical, were always noble and generous. Further, though he seems to have been utterly destitute of the slightest gift of dramatic construction, he had no mean share of a much rarer gift, that of dramatic character; and in a century of descriptions of nature his, if not the most exquisite, have a freedom and truth, a largeness of outline combined with felicity of colour, not elsewhere to be discovered.

But it is as a lyric poet that Browning ranks highest; and in this highest class it is impossible to refuse him all but the highest rank, in some few cases the very highest. He understood love pretty thoroughly; and when a lyric poet understands love thoroughly there is little doubt of his position. But he understood many other things as well, and could give strange and delightful voice to them. Even his lyrics, still more his short non-lyrical poems, admirable as they often are, and closely as they group with the lyrics proper, are not untouched by his inseparable defect. He cannot be prevented from inserting now and then in the midst of exquisite passages more or fewer of his quirks and cranks of thought and phrase, of his vernacularity or his euphuism, of his outrageous rhymes (which, however, are seldom or never absolutely bad), of those fantastic tricks of his in general which remind one of nothing so much as of dashing a bladder with rattling peas in the reader's face just at the height of the passion or the argument.

Yet the beauty, the charm, the variety, the vigour of these short poems are as wonderful as the number of them. He never lost the secret of them to his latest years. The delicious lines "Never the time and the place, And the loved one all together" are late; and there are half a dozen pieces in Asolando, latest of all, which exhibit to the full the almost bewildering beauty of combined sound, thought, and sight, the clash of castanets and the thrill of flutes, the glow of flower and sunset, the subtle appeal for sympathy in feeling or assent in judgment. The song snatches in Pippa Passes, "Through the Metidja," "The Lost Leader," "In a Gondola," "Earth's Immortalities," "Mesmerism," "Women and Roses," "Love Among the Ruins," "A Toccata of Galuppis," "Prospice," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," "Porphyria's Lover," "After," with scores of others, and the "Last Ride Together," the poet's most perfect thing, at the head of the list, are such poems as a very few—Shakespeare, Shelley, Burns, Coleridge—may surpass now and then in pure lyrical perfection, as Tennyson may excel in dreamy ecstasy, as some seventeenth century songsters may outgo in quaint and perfect fineness of touch, but such as are nowhere to be surpassed or equalled for a certain volume and variety of appeal, for fulness of life and thought, of action and passion.

Mr. Browning's wife, Elizabeth Barrett, was older than himself by six years, and her period of popularity considerably anticipated his. But except one very juvenile book she published nothing of importance till 1838, when Browning, whom she did not then know, had already manifested his idiosyncrasy. Miss Barrett, whose father's original name was Moulton, was born at Carlton Hall, Durham, on 6th March 1806. The change of name was brought on by succession to estates in the West Indies; and the family were wealthy. For the greater part of Miss Barrett's youth they lived in Herefordshire at a place, Hope End, which has left great traces on her early poetry; later her headquarters were in London, with long excursions to Devonshire. These excursions were mainly caused by bad health, from which, as well as from family bereavements, Miss Barrett was a great sufferer. She had read widely; she began to write as a mere child; and her studies extended even to Greek, though in a rather amateurish and desultory fashion. Her Essay on Mind and other poems appeared in 1825; but a considerable interval, as noted above, elapsed before, in The Seraphim and other poems, she gave, if not a truer, a more characteristic note. And two more intervals of exactly the same length gave Poems 1846 and Poems 1850, containing most of her best work. Meanwhile she had met Robert Browning, and had married him, rather against the wish of her family, in 1846. The rest of her life was spent mostly at Florence, where, in 1849, the only child of the marriage was born. Two years later appeared Casa Guidi Windows and the long "sociological" romance of Aurora Leigh. In these, and still more in the Poems before Congress (1860), a not unnatural tendency to echo the peculiar form and spirit of her husband's work is observable, not by any means always or frequently to advantage. She died at Florence on 30th June 1861, and next year a volume of Last Poems was issued. The most interesting document in regard to her since has been her Letters to R. H. Horne, the author of Orion, which were published in 1876.

It has been said that Mrs. Browning's popularity long anticipated her husband's; indeed, years after her death, and on the very eve of the publication of The Ring and the Book, it was possible to meet persons, not uncultivated, who were fairly well acquainted with her verse and entirely ignorant of his. The case has since been altered; but it is believed that Mrs. Browning still retains, and it is probable that she will always retain, no small measure of general favour. It has been usual to speak of her as the chief English poetess, which she certainly is if bulk and character of work as distinguished from perfection of workmanship are considered. Otherwise, she must as certainly give place to Miss Christina Rossetti. But Mrs. Browning no doubt combined, in very unusual and interesting manner, the qualities which appeal to what may be called, with no disdainful intention, the crowd of readers of poetry, and those which appeal to the elect. Even the peculiarities which lent themselves so easily to parody—and some of the happiest parodies ever written were devoted to her in Bon Gaultier and other books—did not serve her badly with the general, for a parody always in a way attracts attention to the original. Although her expression was not always of the very clearest, its general drift was never easily mistakable; and though she was wont to enshrine her emotions in something of a mist of mysticism, they were in the main simple and human enough. It must also be admitted that pathetic sentiment is almost the surest of popular appeals in poetry; and Miss Barrett—partly through physical suffering, partly through the bereavements above referred to, but very mainly it may be suspected by temperament and preference—was much more a visitant of the House of Mourning than of the House of Mirth. She was, yet again, profoundly and sincerely, if a little vaguely, religious: and her sacred poems, of which the famous and beautiful "Cowper's Grace" is the chief example, secured one portion of the public to her as firmly as the humanitarianism of "The Cry of the Children," chiming in with famous things of Hood and Dickens, did another; "Isobel's Child," a pathetic domesticity, a third; the somewhat gushing and undistinguished Romanticism of "The Duchess May" and "The Brown Rosary," a fourth; and the ethical and political "noble sentiments" of "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," a fifth.

But it would argue gross unfairness in an advocate, and gross incompetence in a critic, to let it be supposed that these popular attractions were the only ones that Mrs. Browning possessed. Despite and besides the faults which will be presently noticed, and which, critically speaking, are very grave faults, she had poetical merits of a very high order. Her metrical faculty, though constantly flawed and imperfect, was very original and full of musical variety. Although her choice of words could by no means always be commended, her supply of them was extraordinary. Before her imprisonment in sick-rooms she had pored on nature with the eagerest and most observant eye, and that imprisonment itself only deepened the intensity of her remembered nature-worship. Her pathos, if it sometimes over-flowed into gush, was quite unquestionable in sincerity and most powerful in appeal; her sentiment was always pure and generous; and it is most curious to see how in the noble directness of such a piece as "Lord Walter's Wife," not only her little faults of sensiblerie, but her errors of diction, are burnt and smelted out by the fire of the expressed impression. Her verse-pictures—for instance those in the "Vision of Poets"—vie, in beauty if not in clearness of composition and definition, with Tennyson's own. The Romantic pieces already glanced at, obnoxious and obvious as are their defects, unite the pathos and the picturesqueness just assigned to her in a most remarkable manner. And when, especially in the Sonnet, she consented to undergo the limitations of a form which almost automatically restrained her voluble facility, the effect was often simply of the first order. The exquisite "Sonnets from the Portuguese" (which are not from the Portuguese, and are understood to have been addressed to Mr. Browning), especially that glorious one beginning—

(which is not far below Shakespeare's or the great thing which was published as Drayton's), rank with the noblest efforts of the 16th-17th century in this exquisite form. And if this, instead of having to conform to the requirements of a connected history, were a separate study of Mrs. Browning, it would be necessary to mention scores of separate pieces full of varied beauty.

But in no poet, perhaps not even in Byron, are such great beauties associated with such astonishing defects as in Mrs. Browning; some of these defects being so disgusting as well as so strange that it requires not a little critical detachment to put her, on the whole, as high as she deserves to be put. Like almost all women who have written, she was extremely deficient in self-criticism, and positively pampered and abused her natural tendency towards fluent volubility. There is hardly one of the pieces named above, outside the sonnets, with the exception certainly of "Lord Walter's Wife" and possibly of "Cowper's Grave," which would not be immensely improved by compression and curtailment, "The Rhyme of the Duchess May" being a special example. In other pieces not yet specified, such as "The Romaunt of Margret," "Bianca among the Nightingales," and especially "The Poet's Vow," the same defect is painfully felt. That the poetess frequently, and especially in her later poetical work, touches subjects which she does not very well comprehend, and which are very doubtfully suited for poetical treatment at all, is a less important because a more controversial objection; and the merits of such a book as Aurora Leigh depend so much upon the arguing out of the general question whether what is practically a modern novel has any business to be written in verse, that they perhaps can receive no adequate treatment here. But as to the fatal fluency of Mrs. Browning there can be no question before any tribunal which knows its own jurisdiction and its own code. And that fluency extends to more than length. The vocabulary is wilfully and tastelessly unusual,—"abele" rhymed "abeel" for "poplar"; American forms such as "human" for "humanity" and "weaken" for a neuter verb; fustianish words like "reboant"; awkward suggestions of phrase, such as "droppings of warm tears."

But all these things, and others put together, are not so fatal as her extraordinary dulness of ear in the matter of rhyme. She endeavoured to defend her practice in this respect in the correspondence with Horne, but it is absolutely indefensible. What is known as assonance, that is to say, vowel rhyme only, as in Old French and in Spanish, is not in itself objectionable, though it is questionably suited to English. But Mrs. Browning's eccentricities do not as a rule, though they sometimes do, lie in the direction of assonance. They are simply bad and vulgar rhymes—rhymes which set the teeth on edge. Thus, when she rhymes "palace" and "chalice," "evermore" and "emperor," "Onora" and "o'er her," or, most appalling of all, "mountain" and "daunting," it is impossible not to remember with a shudder that every omnibus conductor does shout "Pallis," that the common Cockney would pronounce it "Onorer," that the vulgar ear is deaf to the difference between ore and or, and that it is possible to find persons not always of the costermonger class who would make of "mountain" something very like "mauunting." In other words, Mrs. Browning deliberately, or lazily, or for want of ear, admits false pronunciation to save her the trouble of an exact rhyme. Nay, more, despite her Greek, she will rhyme "idyll" to "middle," and "pyramidal" to "idle," though nothing can be longer than the i in the first case, and nothing shorter than the i in the second. The positive anguish which such hideous false notes as these must cause to any one with a delicate ear, the maddening interruption to the delight of these really beautiful pieces of poetry, cannot be over-estimated. It is fair to say that among the later fruit of her poetical tree there are fewer of these Dead Sea apples,—her husband, who, though audacious, was not vulgar in his rhymes, may have taught her better. But to her earlier, more spontaneous, and more characteristic verse they are a most terrible drawback, such as no other English poet exhibits or suffers.

No poets at all approaching the first class can be said to have been born within a decade either way of Tennyson and Browning, though some extremely interesting writers of verse of about the same date will have to be noticed in the latter part of this chapter. The next year that produced a poet almost if not quite great, though one of odd lapses and limitations, was 1822, the birth-year of Matthew Arnold. When a writer has produced both prose and verse, or prose of distinctly different kinds in which one division or kind was very far superior in intrinsic value and extrinsic importance to the others, it has seemed best here to notice all his work together. But in the case of Mr. Arnold, as in some others, this is not possible, the volume, the character, and the influence of his work in creative verse and critical prose alike demanding separate treatment for the two sections. He was the eldest son of Dr. Arnold, the famous head-master of Rugby, and was educated first at the two schools, Winchester and Rugby itself, with which his father was connected as scholar and master, and then at Balliol, where he obtained a scholarship in 1840. He took the Newdigate in 1844, and was elected a fellow of Oriel in 1845. After some work as private secretary, he received an inspectorship of schools, and held it until nearly the time of his death in 1888. He had been Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1857-67. He published poetry early, and though his fame at this time was never very wide, he was known to those interested in poetry, and especially to Oxford men, for more than twenty years before he acquired popularity as a critic and began the remarkable series of prose works which will be noticed in a later chapter. So early as 1849 he had published, under the initial of his surname only, The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems; but his poetical building was not securely founded until 1853, when there appeared, with a very remarkable preface, a collection of Poems, which was certainly the best thing that had been produced by any one younger than the two masters already discussed. Merope, which followed in 1858, was an attempt at an English-Greek drama, which, with Mr. Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon and Erechtheus, is perhaps the best of a somewhat mistaken kind, for Shelley's Prometheus Unbound soars far above the kind itself. Official duty first, and the growing vogue of his prose writing later, prevented Mr. Arnold from issuing very many volumes of verse. But his New Poems in 1867 made important additions, and in this way and that his poetical production reached by the time of his death no inconsiderable volume—perhaps five hundred pages averaging thirty lines each, or very much more than has made the reputation of some English poets of very high rank. Until late in his own life the general tendency was not to take Mr. Arnold very seriously as a poet; and there are still those who reproach him with too literary a character, who find fault with him as thin and wanting in spontaneity. On the other hand, there are some who not only think him happier in verse than in prose, but consider him likely to take, when the "firm perspective of the past" has dispelled mirages and false estimates, a position very decidedly on the right side of the line which divides the great from the not great.

Family, local, and personal reasons (for Dr. Arnold had a house in the immediate vicinity of Rydal), as well as the strong contemporary set in favour of Wordsworth which prevailed in both universities between 1830 and 1845, caused Mr. Arnold early to take a distinctly Wordsworthian bent. He was, later, somewhat outspoken in his criticism of Wordsworth's weaker points; but it is impossible for any one to read his own poems without perceiving that Arnold stands in a line of filiation from Milton, with a slight deviation by way of Gray, through Wordsworth, though with a strong personal element in his verse. This personal element, besides other things, represents perhaps more powerfully than it represents anything else, and than anything else represents this, a certain reaction from the ornate and fluent Romanticism of the school of Keats and Tennyson. Both, especially the latter, influenced Mr. Arnold consciously and unconsciously. But consciously he was striving against both to set up a neo-classic ideal as against the Romantic; and unconsciously he was endeavouring to express a very decided, though a perhaps not entirely genial or masculine, personal temperament. In other words, Mr. Arnold is on one side a poet of "correctness"—a new correctness as different from that of Pope as his own time, character, and cultivation were from Pope's, but still correctness, that is to say a scheme of literature which picks and chooses according to standards, precedents, systems, rather than one which, given an abundant stream of original music and representation, limits the criticising province in the main to making the thing given the best possible of its kind. And it is not a little curious that his own work is by no means always the best of its kind—that it would often be not a little the better for a stricter application of critical rules to itself.

But when it is at its best it has a wonderful charm—a charm nowhere else to be matched among our dead poets of this century. Coleridge was perhaps, allowing for the fifty years between them, as good a scholar as Mr. Arnold, and he was a greater poet; but save for a limited time he never had his faculties under due command, or gave the best of his work. Scott, Byron, Keats, were not scholars at all; Shelley and Tennyson not critical scholars; Rossetti a scholar only in modern languages. And none of these except Coleridge, whatever their mere knowledge or instruction, had the critical vein, the knack of comparing and adjusting, at all strongly developed. Many attempts have been made at a formula of which the following words are certainly not a perfect expression, that a poet without criticism is a failure, and that a critic who is a poet is a miracle. Mr. Arnold is beyond all doubt the writer who has most nearly combined the two gifts. But for the present we are only concerned with his poetry.

This shows itself distinctly enough, and perhaps at not far from its best, in almost his earliest work. Among this earliest is the magnificent sonnet on Shakespeare which perhaps better deserves to be set as an epigraph and introduction to Shakespeare's own work than anything else in the libraries that have been written on him except Dryden's famous sentence; "Mycerinus," a stately blending of well-arranged six-lined stanzas with a splendid finale of blank verse not quite un-Tennysonian, but slightly different from Tennyson's; "The Church of Brou," unequal but beautiful in the close (it is a curious and almost a characteristic thing that Matthew Arnold's finales, his perorations, were always his best); "Requiescat," an exquisite dirge. To this early collection, too, belongs almost the whole of the singular poem or collection of poems called "Switzerland," a collection much rehandled in the successive editions of Mr. Arnold's work, and exceedingly unequal, but containing, in the piece which begins—

one of the noblest poems of its class which the century has produced; the mono-dramatic "Strayed Reveller," which as mentioned above is one of the very earliest of all; and the more fully dramatised and longer "Empedocles on Etna," in regard to which Mr. Arnold showed a singular vacillation, issuing it, withdrawing nearly all of it, and than issuing it again. Its design, like that of the somewhat later "Merope," is not of the happiest, but it contains some lyrical pieces which are among the best-known and the best of their author's work. Early too, if not of the earliest, are certain longer narrative or semi-narrative poems, not seldom varied with or breaking into lyric—"Sohrab and Rustum" with another of the fine closes referred to, perhaps indeed the finest of all; "The Sick King in Bokhara"; "Balder Dead"; "Tristram and Iseult"; "The Scholar-Gipsy," a most admirable "poem of place," being chiefly devoted to the country round Oxford; "Thyrsis" (an elegy on Clough which by some is ranked not far below Lycidas and Adonais). But perhaps Mr. Arnold's happiest vein, like that of most of the poets of the last two-thirds of the century, lay, not in long poems but in shorter pieces, more or less lyrical in form but not precisely lyrics—in short of the same general class (though differing often widely enough in subject and handling) as those in which the main appeal of Tennyson himself has been said to consist. Such is "The Forsaken Merman," the poet's most original and perhaps most charming if not his deepest or most elaborate thing—a piece of exquisite and passionate music modulated with art as touching as it is consummate; "Dover Beach," where the peculiar religious attitude, with the expression of which so much of Mr. Arnold's prose is concerned, finds a more restrained and a very melodious voice; the half-satiric, half-meditative "Bacchanalia"; the fine "Summer Night"; the Memorial Verses (Mr. Arnold was a frequent and a skilled attempter of epicedes) on Wordsworth, on Heine, and on the dog Geist; with, almost latest of all and not least noble, "Westminster Abbey," the opening passages of which vie in metre (though of a more complicated mould) and in majesty with Milton's "Nativity Ode," and show a wonderful ability to bear this heavy burden of comparison.

Perhaps these last words may not unfairly hint at a defect—if not the defect—of this refined, this accomplished, but this often disappointing poetry. Quite early, in the preface before referred to, the poet had run up and nailed to the mast a flag-theory of poetic art to which he always adhered as far as theory went, and which it may be reasonably supposed he always endeavoured to exemplify in practice. According to this "all depends on the subject," and the fault of most modern poetry and of nearly all modern criticism is that the poets strive to produce and the critics expect to receive, not an elaborately planned and adjusted treatment of a great subject, but touches or bursts of more or less beautiful thought and writing. Now of course it need not be said that in the very highest poetry the excellence of the subject, the complete appropriateness of the treatment, and the beauty of patches and passages, all meet together. But it will also happen that this is not so. And then the poet of "the subject" will not only miss the happy "jewels five words long," the gracious puffs and cat's paws of the wind of the spirit, that his less austere brother secures, but will not make so very much of his subjects, of his schemes of treatment themselves. His ambition, as ambition so often does, will over-reach itself, and he will have nothing to show but the unfinished fragments of a poetical Escurial instead of the finished chantries and altar-tombs which a less formal architect is able to boast.

However this may be, two things are certain, the first that the best work of Matthew Arnold in verse bears a somewhat small proportion to the work that is not his best, and that his worst is sometimes strangely unworthy of him; the second, that the best where it appears is of surpassing charm—uniting in a way, of which Andrew Marvell is perhaps the best other example in English lyric, romantic grace, feeling, and music to a classical and austere precision of style, combining nobility of thought with grace of expression, and presenting the most characteristically modern ideas of his own particular day with an almost perfect freedom from the jargon of that day, and in a key always suggesting the great masters, the great thinkers, the great poets of the past. To those who are in sympathy with his own way of thinking he must always possess an extraordinary attraction; perhaps he is not least, though he may be more discriminatingly, admired by those who are very much out of sympathy with him on not a few points of subject, but who are one with him in the Humanities—in the sense and the love of the great things in literature.

The natural and logical line of development, however, from the originators of the Romantic movement through Keats and Tennyson did not lie through Matthew Arnold; and the time was not yet ripe—it can perhaps hardly be said to be ripe yet—for a reaction in his sense. He was, as has been said, a branch from Wordsworth, only slightly influenced by Tennyson himself, than whom indeed he was not so very much younger. The direct male line of descent lay in another direction; and its next most important stage was determined by the same causes which almost at the middle of the century or a little before brought about Præ-Raphaelitism in art. Both of these were closely connected with the set of events called the Oxford Movement, about which much has been written, but of which the far-reaching significance, not merely in religion but in literature, politics, art, and almost things in general, has never yet been fully estimated. As far as literature is concerned, and this special part of literature with which we are here dealing, this movement had partly shown and partly shaped the direction of the best minds towards the Middle Ages, which had been begun by Percy's Reliques in a vague and blind sort of way, and which had been strengthened, directed, but still not altogether fashioned according to knowledge, by Scott and Coleridge.

This movement which dominates the whole English poetry of the later half of the century with the exception of that produced by a few survivors of the older time, and to which no successor of equal brilliancy and fertility has yet made its appearance, is popularly represented by three writers, two of whom, Mr. William Morris and Mr. Swinburne, are fortunately still alive, and therefore fall out of our province. Rossetti, the eldest of the three, a great influence on both, and as it happens an example unique in all history of combined excellence in poetry and painting, has passed away for some years, and will give us quite sufficient text for explaining the development and illustrating its results without outstripping the limits traced in the preface to this book; while his sister, and a distinguished junior member of the school, also dead, Mr. Arthur O'Shaughnessy, may profitably be brought in to complete the illustration.

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was born in London on 12th May 1828. He was the son of an Italian poet and critic of eminence, who, like so many of his countrymen of literary tastes during the early part of the century, had fallen into the Carbonaro movement, and who had to fly first to Malta and then to England. Here he married Miss Polidori, whose mother was an Englishwoman; and his four children—the two exquisite poets below dealt with, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, a competent critic, and Maria Francesca, the eldest daughter, who wrote an excellent introduction to Dante—all made contributions, and two of them great contributions, to English literature. The father himself, who was Professor of Italian at King's College, London, was an enthusiastic though rather a fantastic Dantist, and somewhat of a visionary generally, with wild notions about mediæval secret societies; but a man of the greatest honesty and honour, and a brilliant contrast to the various patriot-charlatans, from Ugo Foscolo downwards, who brought discredit on the Italian name in his time in England. These particulars, of a kind seldom given in this book, are not otiose; for they have much to do with the singular personality of our English Rossetti himself.

He was educated at King's College School; but his leanings towards art were so strong that at the age of fifteen he began the study of it, leaving school to draw at the Royal Academy and elsewhere. His art career and the formation of the P.R.B. (Præ-Raphaelite Brotherhood) unfortunately fall outside our sphere. It is enough to say that for some twenty years Rossetti, if he was known at all (and he was never known very widely nor did he ever seek notoriety) was known as a painter only, though many who only knew his poems later conceived the most passionate admiration for his painting. Yet he wrote almost as early as he painted, contributing to the famous Præ-Raphaelite magazine, the Germ, in 1850, to the remarkable Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which also saw the early work of Mr. Morris, in 1856, and publishing some translations from The Early Italian Poets in 1861. He had married the year before this last date and was about to publish Poems which he had been writing from an early age. But his wife died in 1862, and in a fit of despair he buried his MSS. in her coffin. They were years afterwards exhumed and the Poems appeared in 1870. Eleven years later another volume of Ballads and Sonnets was published, and Rossetti, whose health in the interval had been much shattered, and who had unfortunately sought refuge from insomnia in chloral, died next year in April 1882. The last years of his life were not happy, and he was most unnecessarily affected by attacks on the first arrangement of his Poems.

These poems had a certain advantage in being presented to a public already acquainted with the work of Mr. Morris and Mr. Swinburne; but Rossetti was not merely older than his two friends, he was also to some extent their master. At the same time the influences which acted on him were naturally diverse from those which, independently of his own influence, acted on them. For the French and English mediæval inspirations of Mr. Morris, for the classical and general study of Mr. Swinburne, he had his ancestral Italians almost for sole teachers; and for their varied interests he had his own art of painting for a continual companion, reminder, and model. Yet the mediæval impulse is almost equally strong on all three, and its intensity shows that it was the real dominant of the moment in English poetry. The opening poem of Rossetti's first book, "The Blessed Damozel," which is understood to have been written very early, though afterwards wrought up by touches both of his love for his wife while living and of his regret for her when dead, is almost a typical example of the whole style and school, though it is individualised by the strong pictorial element rarely absent from his work. The "Blessed Damozel" herself, who "leaned out From the gold Bar of Heaven," is a figure from the Paradiso, divested of the excessive abstraction of that part of Dante, and clothed partly in the gayer colours and more fleshly personality of English and French mediævalism, partly in a mystical halo which is peculiar to these nineteenth century re-creations of mediæval thought and feeling. The poem is of extreme beauty, and ornate as is its language in parts there are touches, such as the poet's reflection

which utter the simplest truth and tenderness; while others, such as the enumeration of the Virgin's handmaidens (over which at the time the hoofs of earless critics danced)—

are consummate triumphs of the word-music brought by Tennyson into English poetry. Indeed this couplet of names might be made a sort of text to expound the great appeal to the ear of this kind of poetry, which any one who is deaf to the exceptional and golden harmony of the arrangement need never hope to appreciate. It is perfectly easy to change the order in many ways without affecting the verse; there is absolutely none of these combinations which approaches the actual one in beauty of sound and suggestion.

"Love's Nocturn" which follows is more of the early Italian school pure and simple; and "Troy Town," a ballad with burdens, is one of a class of poem much affected by Rossetti and ever since, which has produced some admirable work, but is perhaps a little open to the charge of too deliberate archaism. It is at any rate far inferior to his own "Sister Helen." But "The Burden of Nineveh" which follows is in a quite different style, and besides its intrinsic excellence is noteworthy as showing how very far Rossetti was from being limited in his choice of manners. But to go through the whole contents of this very remarkable volume would be impossible, and we can only particularise the great sonnet-sequence "The House of Life" (which was attacked for want of decency with as little intelligence as "The Blessed Damozel" had been attacked for want of sense), and a set "for pictures." The first, somewhat thorny and obscure in language, is of extreme poetical and philosophical beauty. The latter, beautiful enough, may be said to lend themselves a little to the attacks of those critics who charged Rossetti with, in the Aristotelian phrase, "shifting his ground to another kind" or (to vary the words) of taking the quotation ut pictura poesis in too literal a sense. Some songs, especially "Penumbra" and "The Woodspurge," of intense sweetness and sadness, were also included; and the simple directness of "Jenny" showed, like "Nineveh," capacities in the poet not easily to be inferred from the bulk of his poems.

Rossetti's second volume, while it added only too little to the bulk of his work—for much of it consisted of a revised issue of "The House of Life"—added greatly to its enjoyment. But it produced no new kind, unless certain extensions of the ballad-scheme into narrative poems of considerable length—"Rose-Mary," "The White Ship," and "The King's Tragedy"—be counted as such. "Rose-Mary" in particular exhibits the merits and defects of the poet in almost the clearest possible light, and it may be safely said that no English poet, not the very greatest, need have been ashamed of such a stanza as this, where there is no affectation worth speaking of, where the eternal and immortal commonplaces of poetry are touched to newness as only a master touches, and where the turn of the phrase and verse is impeccable and supreme:—

Here, as elsewhere, it has seemed better to postpone most of the necessary general criticism of schools and groups till the concluding chapter, but in this particular respect the paucity of individuals which our scheme leaves (though Miss Rossetti and Mr. O'Shaughnessy will give valuable assistance presently), may make a few words desirable, even if they be partly repetition and partly anticipation. We find in Rossetti a strong influence of pictorial on poetic art; an overpowering tendency to revert to the forms and figures, the sense and sentiment of the past, especially the mediæval past; and a further tendency to a mysticism which is very often, if not always, poetic in character, as indeed mysticism generally if not always is. We find in point of form a distinct preference for lyric over other kinds, a fancy for archaic language and schemes of verse, a further fancy for elaborate and ornate language (which does not, however, exclude perfect simplicity when the poet chooses), and above all, a predilection for attempting and a faculty for achieving effects of verbal music by cunning adjustment of vowel and consonant sound which, though it had been anticipated partially, and as it were accidentally in the seventeenth century, and had been after the Romantic revival displayed admirably by Coleridge and Keats, and brought to a high pitch by Tennyson, was even further elaborated and polished by the present school. Indeed, they may be said to have absolutely finished this poetical appeal as a distinct and deliberate one. All poets have always attempted, and all poets always will attempt, and when they are great, achieve these enchanting effects of mere sound. But for some considerable time it will not be possible (indeed it will be quite impossible until the structure, the intonation, the phrase of English have taken such turns as will develop physical possibilities as different from those of our language as ours are from those of the seventeenth century) for any poets to get distinctly great effects in the same way. It is proof enough of this that, except the masters, no poet for many years now has achieved a great effect by this means, and that the most promising of the newer school, whether they may or may not have found a substitute, are abandoning it.

Rossetti's younger, but very little younger, sister, Christina Georgina, was born in 1830, sat to her brother early for the charming picture of "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," and is said also to figure in his illustration of the weeping queens in Tennyson's Morte D' Arthur. But she lived an exceedingly quiet life, mainly occupied in attention to her mother and in devotion; for she had been brought up, and all her life remained, a member of the Church of England. Her religious feelings more and more coloured her poetical work, which was produced at intervals from 1861 till close upon her death in the winter of 1894-95. It was not hastily written, and latterly formed mainly the embellishment of certain prose books of religious reflection or excerpt. But it was always of an exquisite quality. Its first expression in book form was Goblin Market, and other Poems (1861), which, as well as her next volume, The Prince's Progress (1866), was illustrated by her brother's pencil. A rather considerable time then passed without anything of importance (a book called Sing-Song excepted), till in 1881 A Pageant, and other Poems was added. A collection of all these was issued nine years later, but with this the gleanings from the devotional works above mentioned (the chief of which were Time Flies and The Face of the Deep) have still to be united.

There are those who seriously maintain Miss Rossetti's claim to the highest rank among English poetesses, urging that she excels Mrs. Browning, her only possible competitor, in freedom from blemishes of form and from the liability to fall into silliness and maudlin gush, at least as much as she falls short of her in variety and in power of shaping a poem of considerable bulk. But without attempting a too rigid classification we may certainly say that Miss Rossetti has no superior among Englishwomen who have had the gift of poetry. In the title-piece of her first book the merely quaint side of Præ-Raphaelitism perhaps appears rather too strongly, though very agreeably to some. But "Dreamland," "Winter Rain," "An End," "Echo," the exquisite song for music "When I am dead, my dearest," and the wonderful devotional pieces called "The Three Enemies" and "Sleep at Sea," with many charming sonnets, adorned a volume which, on the whole, showed more of the tendencies of the school than any which had yet appeared. For it was less exclusively mediæval than Mr. Morris' Defence of Guinevere, and very much more varied as well as more mature than Mr. Swinburne's Queen Mother and Rosamond. The Prince's Progress showed a great advance on Goblin Market in dignity and freedom from mannerism, and the minor poems in general rivalled those in the earlier collection, though the poetess perhaps never quite equalled "Sleep at Sea." The contents of A Pageant, and other Poems were at once more serious and lighter than those of the two former books (for Miss Rossetti, like her brother, had a strong touch of humour), while the Collected Poems added some excellent pieces. But the note of the whole had been struck, as is usually the case with good poets who do not publish too early, at the very first.

The most distinguished members, with the exception of Mr. and Miss Rossetti, of this school are still alive; and, as it did not become fashionable until about five-and-twenty years ago, even the junior members of it have in but few cases been sent to that majority of which alone we treat. Mr. John Addington Symonds, an important writer of prose, began early and never abandoned the practice of verse, but his accomplishment in it was never more than an accomplishment. Mr. Philip Bourke Marston, son of Dr. Westland Marston, the dramatist, was highly reputed as a poet by his friends, but friendship and compassion (he was blind) had perhaps more to do with this reputation than strict criticism. The remarkable talents of Mr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, which could never be mistaken by any one who knew him, and of which some memorials remain in verse, were mainly lost to English poetry by the fact of his passing the last twenty years of his life as a Jesuit priest. But the most characteristic figure now passed away was Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-81). He was an official of the British Museum, and published three volumes of poetry—The Epic of Women (1870), Lays of France (1872), and Music and Moonlight (1874)—which were completed in the year of his death by a posthumous volume entitled Songs of a Worker. Of these the Lays of France are merely paraphrases of Marie: great part of the Songs of a Worker is occupied with mere translation of modern French verses—poor work for a poet at all times. But The Epic of Women and Music and Moonlight contain stuff which it is not extravagant to call extraordinary.

It was never widely popular, for O'Shaughnessy pushed the fancy of the Præ-Raphaelites for a dreamy remoteness to its very furthest, and the charge (usually an uncritical one, but usually also explaining with a certain justice a poet's unpopularity) of "lack of human interest" was brought against him. Sometimes, too, either of deliberate conviction or through corrupt following of others, he indulged in expressions of opinion about matters on which the poet is not called upon to express any, in a manner which was always unnecessary and sometimes offensive. But judged as a poet he has the unum necessarium, the individual note of song. Like Keats, he was not quite individual—there are echoes, especially of Edgar Poe, in him. But the genuine and authentic contribution is sufficient, and is of the most unmistakable kind. In the first book "Exile," "A Neglected Heart," "Bisclavaret," "The Fountain of Tears," "Barcarolle," make a new mixture of the fair and strange in meaning, a new valuation of the eternal possibilities of language in sound. Music and Moonlight—O'Shaughnessy was one of the few poets who have been devoted to music—is almost more remote, and even less popularly beautiful; but the opening "Ode," some of the lyrics in the title poem (such as "Once in a hundred years"), the song "Has summer come without the rose," and not a few others, renew for those who can receive it the strange attraction, the attraction most happily hinted by the very title of this book itself, which O'Shaughnessy could exercise. That there was not a little that is morbid in him—as perhaps in the school generally—sane criticism cannot deny. But though it is as unwise as it is unsafe to prefer morbidness for itself or to give it too great way, there are undoubted charms in it, and O'Shaughnessy could give poetical form to these as few others could. Two of his own lines—

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

Another poet whose death brings him within our range, and who may be said to belong, with some striking differences of circumstance as well as individual genius, to the same school, was James Thomson, second of the name in English poetry, but a curious and melancholy contrast to that Epicurean animal, the poet of The Seasons. He was born at Port-Glasgow on 23rd November 1834, and was the son of a sailor. His parents being in poor circumstances, he obtained, as a child, a place in the Royal Caledonian Asylum, and, after a good education there, became an army schoolmaster—a post which he held for a considerable time. But Thomson's natural character was recalcitrant to discipline and distinguished by a morbid social jealousy. He gradually, under the influence of, or at any rate in company with, the notorious Charles Bradlaugh, adopted atheistic and republican opinions, and in 1862 an act of insubordination led to his dismissal from the army, for which he had long lost, if he ever had, any liking. It is also said that the death of a girl to whom he was passionately attached had much to do with the development of the morbid pessimism by which he became distinguished. For some time Thomson tried various occupations, being by turns a lawyer's clerk, a mining agent, and war correspondent of a newspaper with the Carlists. But even before he left the army he had, partly with Mr. Bradlaugh's help, obtained work on the press, and such income as he had during the last twenty years of his life was chiefly derived from it. He might undoubtedly have made a comfortable living in this way, for his abilities were great and his knowledge not small. But in addition to the specially poetical weakness of disliking "collar-work," he was hampered by the same intractable and morose temper which he had shown in the army, by the violence of his religious and political views, and lastly and most fatally by an increasing slavery to drink and chloral. At last, in 1882, he—after having been for some time in the very worst health—burst a blood-vessel while visiting his friend the blind poet Philip Bourke Marston, and died in University College Hospital on 3rd June.