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 appet.i.te 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 ill.u.s.tration, 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 antic.i.p.ating 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 n.o.ble pa.s.sages, 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 t.i.tle 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 Pa.s.ses_, 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 Personae_, 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 Personae_--itself not a long book, though of hardly surpa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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-Schw.a.n.gau_ (1871), _Fifine at the Fair_ (1872), _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ (1873), _Aristophanes" Apology_ and _The Inn Alb.u.m_ (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 Personae_, 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 pa.s.sionately 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 cla.s.sical 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, pa.s.sing 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. 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 n.o.ble and generous. Further, though he seems to have been utterly dest.i.tute 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sent in judgment.
The song s.n.a.t.c.hes in _Pippa Pa.s.ses_, "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, Sh.e.l.ley, Burns, Coleridge--may surpa.s.s 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 surpa.s.sed or equalled for a certain volume and variety of appeal, for fulness of life and thought, of action and pa.s.sion.
Mr. Browning"s wife, Elizabeth Barrett, was older than himself by six years, and her period of popularity considerably antic.i.p.ated 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 doc.u.ment 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 d.i.c.kens, did another; "Isobel"s Child," a pathetic domesticity, a third; the somewhat gushing and undistinguished Romanticism of "The d.u.c.h.ess May" and "The Brown Rosary," a fourth; and the ethical and political "n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.signed 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--
If thou wilt love me, let it be for naught Except for love"s sake only--
(which is not far below Shakespeare"s or the great thing which was published as Drayton"s), rank with the n.o.blest 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 a.s.sociated 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 a.s.sonance, 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 a.s.sonance. 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 "Pal_lis_," that the common c.o.c.kney would p.r.o.nounce 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 cla.s.s who would make of "mountain" something very like "mauunting." In other words, Mrs. Browning deliberately, or lazily, or for want of ear, admits false p.r.o.nunciation 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 cla.s.s 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 Sh.e.l.ley"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-cla.s.sic 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; Sh.e.l.ley 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--
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
one of the n.o.blest poems of its cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s (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 pa.s.sionate music modulated with art as touching as it is consummate; "Dover Beach," where the peculiar religious att.i.tude, 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 "Baccha.n.a.lia"; 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 n.o.ble, "Westminster Abbey," the opening pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages, 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 surpa.s.sing 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 cla.s.sical and austere precision of style, combining n.o.bility 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 Prae-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 pa.s.sed away for some years, and will give us quite sufficient text for explaining the development and ill.u.s.trating 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 ill.u.s.tration.
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 mediaeval 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. (Prae-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 pa.s.sionate admiration for his painting. Yet he wrote almost as early as he painted, contributing to the famous Prae-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 mediaeval inspirations of Mr. Morris, for the cla.s.sical 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 mediaeval 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 mediaevalism, partly in a mystical halo which is peculiar to these nineteenth century re-creations of mediaeval 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
To one it is ten years of years,
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)--
With her five handmaidens, whose names Are five sweet symphonies-- Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, Margaret and Rosalys--
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 cla.s.s 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 th.o.r.n.y 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:--
And lo! on the ground Rose-Mary lay, With a cold brow like the snows ere May, With a cold breast like the earth till Spring-- With such a smile as the June days bring When the year grows warm for harvesting.
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 a.s.sistance presently), may make a few words desirable, even if they be partly repet.i.tion and partly antic.i.p.ation. 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 mediaeval 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 subst.i.tute, 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 ill.u.s.trated by her brother"s pencil. A rather considerable time then pa.s.sed 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 compet.i.tor, 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 cla.s.sification we may certainly say that Miss Rossetti has no superior among Englishwomen who have had the gift of poetry. In the t.i.tle-piece of her first book the merely quaint side of Prae-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 mediaeval 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 compa.s.sion (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 pa.s.sing the last twenty years of his life as a Jesuit priest. But the most characteristic figure now pa.s.sed 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 ent.i.tled _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 Prae-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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tle 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--