THE MINOR POETS, 1830 to 1850.

The view presented in the last chapter is that even Tennyson in his early works displays the qualities to be expected in a time of lowered energy, and gradually, by native force, rises superior to its limits. If this view be sound we should expect the characteristics in question to be much more prominent in lesser men. And this we find to be the case. Besides Tennyson himself and his brothers, the principal poets who had begun to write before 1830, and who may be taken as representative of the early years of the period, were: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mrs. Hemans, Elizabeth Moulton Barrett, Thomas Hood, Henry Taylor, and William Motherwell. We may include also Winthrop Mackworth Praed, for, though his poems were not collected and published till long afterwards, a number of them were written before this date. The Poems of Hartley Coleridge came a little later; and in the last year of the decade then beginning Philip James Bailey won by the long and ambitious poem of Festus, a great reputation which has for many years been fading away.

These writers are unusually hard to classify, because of the absence of any dominant note or of any absorbing interest. The two women first named, Mrs. Hemans and ‘L. E. L.,’ belong rather to the preceding period, though they overlap this. Both are sentimentalists, and time has taken from their work the charm it once possessed. Mrs. Hemans is now unduly depreciated, but the difference between the most favourable and the least favourable critic can only be with regard to the degree of weakness charged against her. L. E. Landon (1802-1838), who became by marriage Mrs. Maclean, was in her own day even more popular than Mrs. Hemans, but she has since been much more completely forgotten. Even the mystery of her death, which was believed by many to be due to foul play, but which in all probability occurred through misadventure, has failed to keep alive the interest in her. Yet, though her verse is of little value, she is one of the best examples of the tendencies of the time. She followed Byron as far as her talents and the restraints of her sex would allow. Her longer poems are on the whole poor; some of her shorter pieces are very readable, but they are chargeable with the fault of an excess of rhetoric. Such as she was in poetry, her work was mostly done before 1830. After that date she wrote some mediocre prose stories, but was comparatively inactive in verse.

Both of Tennyson’s brothers, Charles and Frederick, were, like himself, poets. It has but recently become known that Frederick as well as Charles had a share in the Poems by Two Brothers. Except for this the eldest brother’s publications were of much later date; but Charles Tennyson, afterwards Charles Tennyson Turner, followed up the joint venture with another of his own, a slim volume of Sonnets and Fugitive Pieces, published in 1830. This attracted the attention of Coleridge, who bestowed warm but discriminating praise upon the sonnets. Both as to fame, and probably as to his own productiveness, Charles Tennyson Turner was crushed, as it were, under his greater brother. He wrote little more, though he carefully revised and in some respects decidedly improved his sonnets. It is by virtue of them that he takes his place among English poets. They are graceful and sweet, but the substance is not always worthy of the form. They reveal everywhere the interests and the pursuits of the Vicar of Grasby, and they are honourable to his peaceful piety. It is evident that both Charles and Frederick Tennyson, and especially the latter, might have been disposed to adapt to themselves the humorous complaint of the second Duke of Wellington, and exclaim, ‘What can a man do with such a brother?’ Though the eldest of the three, Mr. Frederick Tennyson belongs by the date of his publications rather to the period after than to the period before 1870.

Of the other writers, Praed, accomplished and exceedingly clever, but never impelled to do anything really great, may be regarded as a victim of the prevalent want of purpose. So may Hood, in respect of that section of his works which naturally goes along with those of Praed. Hood, it is true, was too great a man to be dismissed as merely a writer of the transition; yet, just because of his greatness, his history shows better than that of any other man how earnestness was discouraged and triviality fostered. Seldom have so great poetic gifts been so squandered—with no dishonour to Hood—on mere puns. The poet, as an early critic pointed out, was a man of essentially serious mind; but he had to earn bread for himself and his children, and as jesting paid, while serious poetry did not, he was compelled to jest.

Thomas Hood inherited from a consumptive family a feeble constitution, and the latter part of his life was a gallant but painful struggle against disease. His literary life began in 1821, when he was made ‘a sort of sub-editor’ of the London Magazine. Lycus the Centaur, a boldly imaginative piece for so young a man, appeared in 1822. The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, a fine specimen of graceful fancy deservedly ranked high by himself, and the powerful and terrible Eugene Aram’s Dream, were likewise early pieces. The latter may be contrasted for its treatment of crime with Bulwer Lytton’s well-known novel on the story of the same murderer. The advantage in imaginative force and insight, as well as in moral wholesomeness, is all on the side of Hood.

These pieces prove that the vein of serious poetry was present from the first in Hood. The vein of jest and pun was equally natural to him. Jokes of all kinds, practical and other, enlivened and sometimes distracted his own household. This liking for fun inspired the Odes and Addresses to Great People, written in conjunction with John Hamilton Reynolds, the Whims and Oddities, and the succession of Comic Annuals, the first of which appeared in 1830. The presence of such a light and playful element in a great man’s work is by no means to be regretted; but in Hood’s case, unfortunately, there was for many years little else. Hood was blameless, for he had to live. With characteristic modesty he seems for a time to have been persuaded that the public were right, and that nature meant him for a professional jester. It was fortunate that he lived to change this opinion, for much of his finest poetry belongs to his closing years.

Perhaps the most original fruit of Hood’s genius is Miss Kilmansegg, which conceals under a grotesque exterior deep feeling and effective satire. It has been sometimes ranked as Hood’s greatest work; and if comparison be made with his longer pieces only, or if we look principally to the uniqueness of the poem, the judgment will hardly be disputed; but probably the popular instinct which has seized upon The Song of the Shirt and The Bridge of Sighs, and the criticism which exalts The Haunted House, are in this instance sounder. The grotesque element cannot be employed freely without damage to the pure poetic beauty of the piece in which it occurs; and Miss Kilmansegg certainly does suffer such damage.

The Song of the Shirt and The Bridge of Sighs are by far the most popular of Hood’s poems. They have the great merit of perfect truth of feeling. Handling subjects which tempt to sentiment, and even to that excess of sentiment known in the language of slang as ‘gush,’ they are wholly free from anything false or weak or merely lachrymose. Pity makes the verse, but it is the pity of a manly man. The Haunted House, first published in the opening number of Hood’s Magazine, stands at the head of the writer’s poetry of pure imagination. Few pieces can rival it for eeriness of impression, and few exhibit such delicate skill in the choice of details in description. The centipede, the spider, the maggots, the emmets, the bats, the rusty armour and the tattered flags, all help to deepen the sense of desolation and decay. This piece, with the more serious ones already mentioned, and a few others, such as Ruth and The Death-Bed, are Hood’s best title to fame. The growth in their relative number as time went on, the increasing wealth of imagination and the greater flexibility of verse, all show that Hood was to the end a progressive poet. If he had lived longer and enjoyed better health his fame might have been very great. He was the victim of the transition, and through tardiness of recognition and the want of any influence to draw him out, he failed to leave a sufficient body of pure and great poetry to sustain permanently a high reputation. As the author of a few pieces with the unmistakable note of poetry he can never be quite forgotten.

Passing mention may be accorded along with Hood to Laman Blanchard, a very minor poet, who showed the same combination of seriousness with fun. He was an agreeable writer, but not, even at his best, a distinguished one.

The man of closest affinity to Hood was Winthrop Mackworth Praed, who began by contributing at school to The Etonian, and continued at Cambridge to write for Knight’s Quarterly Magazine. He entered Parliament, and if he had lived he would probably have risen to eminence there. Praed belongs to the class of writers of vers de sociÉtÉ of which Prior is the earlier and Locker-Lampson the later master; and it is not too much to say that he surpasses both. It is a species of verse well adapted to such a period as that in which Praed lived. Great earnestness is not required, and is even fatal to it. The qualities essential to success are culture, good-breeding, wit and lightness of touch. Praed had them all. The cleverness and wit and delicacy which nature had given him were all increased by the influence of his school and university, where he acquired all the grace of scholarship without any of the ponderosity of learning. But Praed had one more gift, without which his verses must have taken a lower place—the gift of a refined poetic fancy. It is this that gives his wit its special charm, and it is this too that saves his verse from being that merely of a very clever and refined jester. The well-known character of The Vicar is one of the best examples of this combination of feeling with lightness. Herein we detect the difference between Praed’s wit and the wit of Hood. The latter commonly separated jest from earnest, and gave himself wholly over to one or the other. He is far the more pronounced punster. The pleasant surprises of Praed’s verse usually arise from some delicate turn of thought rather than from a twisting of words. Hood’s fun is sometimes almost boisterous, Praed’s is never so. As regards the lighter verse, the advantage on comparison is all on the side of the younger man. But there is no other aspect to Praed. Notwithstanding the undertone of seriousness, notwithstanding too the strange power of that masterpiece of the grotesque, The Red Fisherman, it remains doubtful whether he had the capacity to be more than what he is, the prince of elegant and refined writers of light verse. Hood is indubitably a poet.

It is likewise as a writer of vers de sociÉtÉ that Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, is best known, and is happiest. But though he shines as a writer of what may be called, without disparagement, poetical trifles, there is also a serious strain by no means contemptible in his verse. Strangers Yet is a fine specimen of pathos. In Poems, Legendary and Historical, however, Houghton is less successful, and the best of them do not bear comparison with Aytoun’s Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, which belong to the same class. Houghton’s critical work in prose is on the whole more valuable than his verse, for there his culture told, and the lack of high imagination is less felt.

Richard Harris Barham represents a type of humour much broader than that of Praed. His Ingoldsby Legends have enjoyed a popularity wider, probably, than that of any other humorous verse of the century. They are clever, rapid in narrative, and resourceful in phrase and in rhyme. Yet a certain want of delicacy in the wit and of melody in the verse is evident when we compare them with the work of Hood and Praed, or that of such later humorists as Calverley, or J. K. Stephen, or Lewis Carroll. Barham’s last composition, ‘As I laye a-thynkynge,’ contains the promise of success if he had written serious poetry.

Hartley Coleridge was a poet of a totally different type; and we must ascribe the fact that he never redeemed his early promise to hereditary weakness of will rather than to any adverse influence of the time. Against the latter he had a defence that did not in the same measure shield any other contemporary. He was the special inheritor of the great traditions of the so-called Lake school; and he was cradled in poetry. His infancy and childhood are celebrated both by his father and by Wordsworth. Derwent Coleridge tells a story of his brother, which shows that Wordsworth accurately described Hartley as one ‘whose fancies from afar are brought,’ and who made ‘a mock apparel’ of his words. ‘Hartley, when about five years old, was asked a question about himself being called Hartley. “Which Hartley?” asked the boy. “Why! is there more than one Hartley?” “Yes,” he replied, “there’s a deal of Hartleys.” “How so?” “There’s Picture-Hartley (Hazlitt had painted a portrait of him) and Shadow-Hartley, and there’s Echo-Hartley, and there’s Catch-me-fast Hartley”; at the same time seizing his own arm very eagerly.’ Evidently this boy lived in a world of day-dreams, in a ‘perpetual perspective.’ The problem of the education of such a young idealist is a difficult one; but it seems clear that its principle ought to have been a judicious, not a harsh or pedantic, regularity. His father’s aspiration of ‘wandering like a breeze’ was not for him. But instead, Hartley’s actual education was irregular and desultory. Nothing was done to improve his natural defect and to discipline his will; and weakness of will wrecked his life. The fellowship he had won at Oriel College was forfeited for intemperance, and he never conquered the habit, but sank from depth to depth, a pitiable example of genius gone to waste.

Though Hartley Coleridge wrote prose as well, his name is now associated only with his poems. A volume of these was published in 1833. It was marked Vol. I., but no second ever appeared. The poems however were re-edited, with additions, by Derwent Coleridge, in 1851. Hartley Coleridge nowhere shows the supreme poetic gift his father possessed; but as in sheer genius the elder Coleridge was probably superior to any contemporary, so Hartley seems to have been the superior by endowment of any poet then writing, Tennyson and Browning alone excepted. Weakness of will, unfortunately, doomed him to excel only in short pieces, and to be far from uniform in these. It would have been wiser to omit the section of ‘playful and humorous’ pieces. But the sonnets are very good, and some of them are excellent. A few of the songs take an equally high rank, especially the well-known She is not fair to outward view, and ’Tis sweet to hear the merry lark. There are many suggestions of Wordsworth, but Hartley Coleridge is not an imitative poet. Without any striking originality he is fresh and independent. His verse betrays a gentle and kindly as well as a sensitive character. He evidently felt affection for all living things, and especially for all that was weak, whether from nature, age, or circumstance. Some of this feeling turns back, as it were, upon himself, in the numerous and often pathetic poems in which he appears to be contemplating his own history. He is of the school of Wordsworth in his love for and his familiar communion with nature; and here at least he gathered some fruit from the ‘unchartered freedom’ of his existence.

Hartley Coleridge belonged to a family unique in its power of transmitting genius. His sister Sara likewise inherited intellectual and imaginative gifts probably little if at all inferior to his; but circumstances prevented her from making a great name. She married another Coleridge of genius, her cousin, Henry Nelson, whose untimely death threw a burden upon her, as editor of her father’s literary remains, that absorbed her time and energies. Her only book is Phantasmion, a fairy tale, whose lyric snatches prove her worthy of remembrance among English poetesses.

Of the other poets who have been named, William Motherwell was the least considerable both in achievement and in gifts. He had a taste for research in old popular poetry, but he took such liberties that his versions are not to be trusted. He also allowed the pseudo-antique to mar some of his own work, especially the fine Cavalier Song. He is happiest in the vein of pathetic Scotch verse, of which the best specimen he left is his Jeanie Morison. He had the feeling and sensibility of a minor Burns, but not the force. Contemporary with Motherwell and, on the Scotch side of his work, not dissimilar, was William Thom (1798-1848), ‘the weaver poet,’ best known for The Blind Boy’s Pranks. Dialect alone unites with these two George Outram (1805-1856) a man little known out of Scotland, but, in his best pieces, one of the most irresistibly humorous of comic poets. Nothing but unfamiliarity with the legal processes and phrases on which the wit frequently turns, prevents him from being widely popular. For rich fun The Annuity, his masterpiece, has seldom been surpassed.

Henry Taylor lifts us once more into a higher sphere of art. He lived an even and unruffled life, the spirit of which seems to have passed into his works. The son of a country gentleman, he procured an appointment in the Colonial office, gradually rose in it, was knighted, and after nearly half a century of service, retired in 1872. The comfortable and easy life of office permitted Taylor to develop his powers to the uttermost. For a greater man its very smoothness might have been damaging. Great poetry requires passion: either the passion of the emotional nature, or that passion of thought which, as Mr. William Watson has lately reminded the world, is no less valuable for the purposes of art. Official life fosters neither; but it would seem that Sir Henry Taylor’s nature contained the germ of neither. Hence perhaps, in part, his disapproval of the school of Byron. His practice would have been as excellent as his theory had he been one of those who know

‘A deeper transport and a mightier thrill
Than comes of commerce with mortality.’

But he was wanting in the second kind of passion, as well as in the first. His work is like his life, smooth, calm, unchargeable with faults; but it is not the kind that animates mankind.

Sir Henry Taylor wrote prose as well as verse, in particular a very readable autobiography. It is however chiefly as a dramatist that he is memorable. His plays are the closet studies of a cultured man of letters, who knew little and cared little about the conditions of the stage. Isaac Comnenus (1827) was followed by his masterpiece, Philip Van Artevelde (1834). Edwin the Fair appeared in 1842, and his last play, St. Clement’s Eve, in 1862. He also wrote one other piece, A Sicilian Summer, a kind of comedy, not very successful.

Philip Van Artevelde is so clearly Taylor’s best work that his literary faculty may be judged, certainly without danger of depreciation, from it alone. It is a historical drama, and the title sufficiently indicates the age and country in which the scene is laid. The whole drama is long, and the slow movement adapts it rather for reading than for representation. It is composed of two parts, separated by The Lay of Elena, a lyrical piece in which may be detected echoes both of Wordsworth and Coleridge, with an occasional suggestion of Scott. The weakest element of the drama is the treatment of passion. Taylor’s incapacity to comprehend it is strikingly illustrated in the passage where Philip, immediately after his declaration of love to Elena, reflects upon the caprice of a woman’s fancy which

‘Takes no distinction but of sex,
And ridicules the very name of choice.’

The thought is a little trite, and the words are extraordinary in the mouth of a newly-accepted lover. We may confidently look to Taylor for careful and workmanlike delineation of character, but we shall find in him no profound insight. Philip proses about the burden he takes up and the cares he endures. But notwithstanding defects, the interest is fairly well sustained, some of the situations are impressive, and the verse is frequently lit with flashes of imaginative power. A man of talent with a touch of genius, Taylor saw clearly what the poetry of his time needed, but for want of the ‘passion of thought’ he failed to supply it.

One contemporary at least showed by his practice that he agreed with Taylor as to the necessity of setting poetry on a philosophical basis. Philip James Bailey published Festus in 1839. It has been the work of his life, for though he wrote other pieces afterwards, most of them have been incorporated, wholly or in part, with Festus. The consequence is that the poem, long originally, has grown to enormous dimensions. It is an ambitious attempt to settle all the fundamental problems of the universe, and it was once hailed with a chorus of praise that would almost have sufficed for Homer or Milton. This praise remains one of the curiosities of criticism for later days to marvel at. Festus is not profound philosophy, and still less is it true poetry. The thought when probed is commonplace. A vigorous expression here and there is hardly enough to redeem the weak echoes of Goethe and Byron. Frequently the verse is distinguishable from prose only by the manner of printing. ‘Swearers and swaggerers jeer at my name’ is supposed to be an iambic line. We are told that a thing is in our ‘soul-blood’ and our ‘soul-bones;’ and we hear of ‘marmoreal floods’ that ‘spread their couch of perdurable snow.’ Yet this passes for poetry, and Festus has gone through many editions in this country, and still more in America. The aberration of taste is not quite as great as that which raised Martin Farquhar Tupper and his Proverbial Philosophy to the highest popularity, but it is similar in kind.

A more interesting and far superior example of the class of thoughtful poets was Richard Henry, or, as he called himself in later life, Richard Hengist Horne. Horne was a man of versatile talent who, after an adventurous youth in which he saw something of warfare and passed through many adventures on the coasts of America and, at a later date, in the Australian bush, settled down to a literary life. His first memorable works were two tragedies, Cosmo de’ Medici and The Death of Marlowe, both published in the year 1837. A third tragedy, Gregory VII., appeared in 1840. Horne’s dramas are thoughtful, and they have the vigour which marked his own character. Yet Horne seems to have felt that there was something not wholly satisfactory in his dramatic work, and, except Judas Iscariot (1848), his more noteworthy writings in later days are either prose, or lyrical verse, or epic blank verse. He is best known by Orion, an Epic Poem (1843). It is an epic with a philosophic groundwork, ‘intended,’ as the author himself explains, ‘to work out a special design, applicable to all time, by means of antique or classical imagery and associations.... Orion, the hero of my fable, is meant to present a type of the struggle of man with himself, i.e., the contest between the intellect and the senses.’ Horne sarcastically hinted his sense of the improbability that such a poem would find a sale by publishing the first three editions at a farthing, with the explanation that he did so ‘to avoid the trouble and greatly additional expense of forwarding presentation copies.’

Orion is Horne’s masterpiece. The philosophic thought clogs the epic movement, but the thought is weighty enough, and expressed with sufficient terseness and force, to be worthy of attention for its own sake. The verse is almost always good and sometimes excellent. Horne is indebted more to Keats than to anyone else. Sometimes he appears to echo him consciously; at other times the reminiscence is probably unconscious. But as Horne was always a bold and original thinker his discipleship was altogether good for him. The sonorous quality of his verse is partly due to his model; the meaning remains his own.

Another true poet whose work belongs largely to this early period was William Barnes, author of Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect. This collection, published in 1879, and embracing the work of more than forty years, may be said to sum up his literary life; for, though he wrote prose as well as poetry, it is only by his verses in dialect that he has any chance to be remembered. Barnes began writing his Dorset poems in 1833, and continued to do so at intervals all through his life. The great charm of his poetry is its perfect freshness. The Dorset poems are eclogues, wholly free from the artificiality which commonly mars compositions of that class; they are clear, simple, rapid and natural. There is no affectation of profound thought, and no straining after passion, but a wholly unaffected love for the country and all that lives and grows there. The vital importance of language to poetry is nowhere more clearly seen than in Barnes, for all the spirit of the Dorset poems evaporates, and all the colour fades from the specimens the poet was induced to publish in literary English.

There were numerous inferior writers, a few of whom claim a passing notice. James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849) is one of those Irishmen with regard to whose work a wide difference of opinion exists between his countrymen and English critics. He had certainly an ear for verse and a gift for making it, and if his equipment of ideas had been proportionate he would have been a great poet. His weakness is that, while he can say things pleasantly, he has but little to say. Charles Whitehead (1804-1862) was one of those who attempted dramatic composition, but his best work was The Solitary (1831), a reflective poem in the Spenserian stanza, thoughtful but slow in movement, and as a whole somewhat tiring. Thomas Wade (1805-1875) was likewise a mediocre dramatist, whose name is now associated only with Mundi et Cordis Carmina, a book which bears many traces of the influence of Shelley.

Ebenezer Jones (1820-1860) also, though much younger than these men, falls, by reason of his principal work, Studies of Sensation and Event (1843), within the same period. Jones was crushed by circumstances and the want of appreciation, otherwise his sensitive nature might have produced good, though hardly great poetry.