"The air is sweet and bright and hot, And loaded fruit-trees lean around; There black unmoving shadows spot The twinkling grass, the sunny ground; No sound of mirth or toil to wrong The orchard's hush at Hougoumont ! And silver daisies simply deck With meek bright eyes that orchard-plot; And therein lurks, an azure speck, The tiny starred Forget-me-not Fond type of hearts that love and long At every step the beetles run, Where none pursue, in vain concealed; The headlong humble-bee alone Assaults the old and crumbling wall; His busy bugle faintly blown, Aloft the moaning pigeons coo, One gurgling note unvaried still; The meads with hollow murmurs fill; Dear Nature does her best to please! -Oh, God! what are we? Do we then Can thirty thousand thinking men Fall-and but leave the fields more green? 'Tis strange-but Hope, be staunch and strong! It seems so at sweet Hougoumont." The world did not conceive Browning to have established himself as "decisively" in 1845 as it judged Tennyson to have done in 1842; and possibly there may for a long time be more doubt about his position among poets than about Tennyson's. But when we look back now it seems evident that the man who had written Paracelsus and Pippa Passes and the Dramatic Romances and Lyrics must prove a power of the first importance in literature. Force, originality, philosophy even in superabundance, all these he promised to add to the literature of the future ; and in large measure he had already added them. Besides all this, his cosmopolitanism must not be forgotten. Here, as in many other points, he contrasts with Tennyson. While the latter is intensely patriotic, the note of nationality is rare in Browning. He is Nelson's to command at any time in prose or rhyme; off Cape Trafalgar he drinks the great Admiral's health deep in British beer; and, viewed in a loftier mood, the same scene gives birth to the noble Home Thoughts, from the Sea. But as a rule Browning is cosmopolitan in his championship of liberty as in other things. His mixed blood seems to predestine him for this. There is in fact more of Italy, at least in respect of subjectmatter, than of England in his verse. So he himself felt when he adapted to himself the old story of Queen Mary, and said that the word Italy would be found engraved on his heart. Yet notwithstanding the immense part which Italy played in furnishing Browning's mind, it would be a profound mistake to regard his genius as Italian in type. In the substance of his mind he was essentially Teutonic. It was a good omen for English literature that the two leaders in poetry differed from one another so widely: it could not be a bad omen that while the one was fervidly patriotic, the other was frankly cosmopolitan. CHAPTER III THE MINOR POETS: EARLIER PERIOD THERE is something unpleasant in the phrase, minor poets; and yet it is hardly possible to dispense with the use of it. In the present chapter there will be found included names, such as that of Mrs Browning, to which its application may seem almost insulting; and it may be well therefore to explain at the start that it is merely meant to convey the view that the poets so designated are of lesser rank than Tennyson and Browning. It has been said that English literature is not a republic but a monarchy of letters, and that all its members are the subjects of King Shakespeare. In comparison with him, all others might fairly be described as "minor" writers. Adapting this saying, we have taken Tennyson and Browning to be the joint monarchs of early Victorian song. In the general opinion their reign lasted through the whole length of the period; and as they themselves may be called minor in relation to Shakespeare, so all their contemporaries in verse may be called minor in relation to them. In spite of the fact that the vogue of poetry had passed, an immense amount of poetical work was executed in the twenty years or so which preceded the turn of the century. Some of it was of kinds long rooted in our literature; some may be said to illustrate the transition between the age which was passing away and that which was coming into being. Other sections of it, again, are marked by the special qualities which we have already found to be, in one way or another, distinctive of this period; and yet others are prophetic of qualities not up to this point fully revealed. § I. The Balladists. There can be no hesitation in ranking the writers of ballads among those who look to the past rather than to the future; and this not merely, nor even chiefly, because the ballad form is one of the oldest in our literature. A more cogent reason in the present instance is that all the early Victorian writers of ballads are more or less closely akin to Scott, and contentedly accept him as their model. Neither Macaulay, nor Aytoun, nor Motherwell, nor R. S. Hawker would have written such verse as they did if Scott had not revived the Border Ballads, and written splendid specimens of the modern ballad as well. At the head of this group stands Macaulay by virtue of the Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), in the preface to which the debt to Scott and to the old ballads is explicitly acknowledged. The Lays have, like the rest of Macaulay's works, passed through a period of undue depreciation, and seem now to be read in a fair and just spirit. They were criticised by Matthew Arnold, with a harshness and injustice rare in him, as "pinchbeck." But pinchbeck is something which, superficially, looks better than it is; while the Lays pretend to be nothing but just exactly what they are. They are not great poetry: no competent judge ever claimed that they were. They are not even among the best of their kind; for there are heights in such ballads as Scott's Cadyow Castle and Harlaw and Rossetti's King's Tragedy, to which Macaulay could never soar. But his Lays are nevertheless extremely spirited verse, altogether admirable for the purpose he had in view, and an excellent example of the historical spirit transfused into verse. For here as always Macaulay is essentially the historian. So he is also in the English ballads, The Armada and The Battle of Naseby; so he is in the lay of Ivry; so in great measure he is in the beautiful verses written after his defeat at Edinburgh; and it is evident that the historical spirit inspires even the finest of all his poems, the Epitaph on a Jacobite. This is the true spirit of the balladist; and Macaulay succeeds in his verse just because he calls into play his own strongest faculties. The popular taste which raised the Lays into favour was neither an ignoble nor a mistaken one. They have a fine martial ring, such as is hardly to be found except in Homer or in Scott or in William Morris, they are altogether wholesome in tone, and they are exactly the right thing for the purpose in view. The influence of the striking success of the Lays of Ancient Rome is seen, six years later, in the appearance of the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers (1848). This was the work of William Edmondstoune Aytoun (1813-1865), the brilliant professor of English literature in the University of Edinburgh. Aytoun, though not a great writer, did several things very well. He was a good critic, an excellent story-teller, and one of the best of parodists. His novel, Norman Sinclair, though ill-constructed, has much of the interest of a quasi-autobiography, and is enlivened with the humour which seasons the best of his Blackwood tales,-for example, the famous Glenmutchkin Railway. Contemporaneously with the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers Aytoun was writing, in conjunction with Mr (now Sir) Theodore Martin, the Bon Gaultier Ballads, a collection of humorous pieces, including, with much besides that is good, the admirable Massacre of the Macpherson. In the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers Aytoun is hardly so successful. Though inspiriting, they are far inferior to the ballads of Scott, on which they are modelled. The verse is highly rhetorical and sometimes inflated. The material is frequently beaten out too thin, and the poetic feeling is less pure and true than it is in the Lays of Ancient Rome. Nevertheless, The Burial March of Dundee, Edinburgh after Flodden and The Island of the Scots are all inspired by a fine feeling of chivalry which ought long to preserve them. That beautiful poem Hermotimus shows powers of a different and in some respects of a higher order. It is written in the difficult measure of The Bride of Corinth by Goethe, of whom Aytoun was one of the earliest admirers, and of whose Faust he made a translation which was never published. As in Aytoun so too in Sir Francis Hastings Doyle (1810 |