Ne'er by the rivulets I strayed, And ne'er upon my childhood weighed Instead of shores where ocean beats, I hear the ebb and flow of streets." But if he had limited experience he had the gift of imaginative sympathy; and one of the great charms of the poem is its suggestion of the contrast between the beauty of "trailing showers and breezy downs," and that other beauty which dwells in "the tragic heart of towns." In a different key, but almost as fine as the poem on Glasgow, is the lyric Barbara, in Horton. It is not free from the 'spasmodic' faults, but the wistful melancholy of the closing stanzas gives them a rare beauty. There was more ground for disappointment with Edwin of Deira; but, oddly enough, the critics received it more favourably. It is a poem of epic form founded upon a story of Saxon times; and, though it has fewer faults than the Life Drama, it is not so clear that it has more or higher beauties. Many passages are diffuse and weak, few rise to distinction, and the poem fails to impress itself upon the memory. A comparison of it with City Poems suggests that Smith's strength lay in the lyric and in short narrative or introspective pieces. Had he left a considerable body of verse of the type of Glasgow and Barbara and Squire Maurice and The Night before the Wedding, his name would have been great. Dobell, before his acquaintance with Smith began, drew a contrast between himself and his future friend and comrade in words which exactly hit the truth about them both. "Somebody," he says, "Samuel Brown, I think-said of me that I was mere Thought.' Alexander is sensuous beyond even Keatsian intensity1." In its root-principle the poetic work of the one is widely different from that of the other, and they are bound together rather by the presence of common faults than by the possession of common merits. Dobell is spasmodically intellectual, Smith spasmodically sensuous. Both are frequently extravagant and tasteless and turgid in style; both are prone to "tear a passion to tatters." 1 Life of Dobell, i. 243–4. But when Dobell is good, he is good from force of mind; when Smith is good, it is because of that sensitiveness which enabled him to divine nature before he had well seen her. Another criticism of Smith may be quoted, as much for what is mistaken in it as for what is true. "The antecedents of the Life Drama," says Clough, "the one long poem which occupies almost the whole of his volume, are to be found in the Princess, in parts of Mrs Browning, in the love of Keats, and in the habit of Shakespeare. There is no Pope, or Dryden, or even Milton; no Wordsworth, Scott, or even Byron to speak of1." Except in one important point this is sound. There is in Smith more of Keats than of anyone else; but there is also, in spirit rather than in phraseology, a good deal of Byron. In fact, the Spasmodic School may be defined as a blend of Keats with Byron, differences within it depending upon the proportions in which the ingredients are mixed. Dobell leans towards Byron, Smith leans towards Keats. 1 Clough's Prose Remains. CHAPTER VII LATER DEVELOPMENTS THE Oxford poets left no successors, except in so far as Mr William Watson may be considered the successor and disciple of Matthew Arnold. The Spasmodic School died with Dobell, The faults indicated by the nickname are perennial in literature; but Dobell and Smith transmitted their beauties to no one; perhaps because those beauties were too fragmentary and too closely associated with imperfection to be transmissible. Only the Pre-Raphaelite group left a poetical progeny: it was they and Tennyson who jointly moulded poetry in the sixties and seventies. Over their work, however, there gradually passes a change, which has been noted in Tennyson himself, in the development from Locksley Hall to Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, in the firmer grip of reality and the more rugged style. In William Morris this shows itself in the change from pure mediævalism to the eminently modern note of Chants for Socialists. This phase of poetry is derived from Carlyle and those other writers who in the middle of the century urged so insistently the social problems which the industrial revolution was gradually forcing upon the attention of men. Another offshoot is the work of the group of writers who found their themes in the slums of great cities, and who would prepare the way for improvement by first showing the facts in their ugliness. There is also a continuance and a further development of that spirit of nationality which has been illustrated in Dobell; but this is independent- not derived from him, but the outgrowth of the facts which inspired him. It manifests itself in various ways; in the poetry of the Celtic Revival; in the growing interest in Scandinavian myths and legends; in the beginnings of English imperialism, of which Mr Rudyard Kipling has latterly been the most eloquent mouthpiece. § I. The later Pre-Raphaelites and their Kin. The first poet of note who worked in the spirit of Rossetti was William Morris (1834-1896), a man of multifarious activity, whose work, even when it is least literary, throws a powerful light upon the conditions under which modern literature is produced, and upon the forces which mould the mind of the man of letters. "Poet, artist, manufacturer, and socialist, author of The Earthly Paradise': this terse unimpassioned entry in the Fasti Britannici sums up, in a form of words which he would himself have accepted as substantially accurate, the life and work of a remarkable man." With these words the biographer of Morris opens the story of his life; and in "this terse unimpassioned entry" we shall find the reason why Morris deserves close attention as a man, no less than as a writer. The life of Morris is an epitome of what Carlyle and Ruskin, Maurice and Kingsley were teaching; and he shows in his own person, better than anyone else, how that democracy which in 1832 began to find its footing in English politics affected every form of intellectual activity. It will not therefore be amiss to consider the question how he who is described by a college friend as one whose "manners and tastes and sympathies were all aristocratic'," came to be not only a "manufacturer and socialist," but the man of many crafts, whose hands often bore the tints of the dyes among which he worked, or the grime of the tools he handled. William Morris was sent first to Marlborough, and then, after an interval under a private tutor, to Exeter College, Oxford, where he soon struck up a close friendship with Edward Burne1 R. W. Dixon, quoted in Mackail's Life of Morris, i. 46. Jones, who was afterwards so intimately associated with him in his artistic work. Both looked towards the Church as their profession, and both were afterwards diverted from it by the more powerful attractions of art. Ten or fifteen years earlier they would almost certainly have taken orders; but the Oxford of the fifties had lost the fervour which distinguished its theological discussions prior to the secession of Newman. Moreover, in the case of Morris, other influences sprang up to modify and counteract the High Church tendencies with which he had been so deeply imbued that in the early part of his undergraduate course he contemplated founding a monastery. The contemporary writers who chiefly swayed his mind were Carlyle, Ruskin and Rossetti, none of whom was likely to lead him in the steps of Newman or of Pusey. In the past his favourites were Chaucer, Malory and the Scandinavian myths, to which he was introduced by Thorpe's Northern Mythology. Most of these were unknown to him when he first went to Oxford. It was not till 1854 that he knew even the name of Rossetti, who for a time swept him off his feet and whirled him away in the stream of Pre-Raphaelitism. Previous to the full development of the Rossetti influence Morris had taken the momentous decision to be an artist. The art he chose was architecture; but Rossetti lured him temporarily to painting; and a strong disapproval of the processes of 'restoration' permanently alienated him from architecture as the profession of his life, though he continued to be deeply interested in it. In the meantime he had taken somewhat unwillingly to the art of poetry. The first poem he ever wrote, The Willow and the Red Cliff, was read to his friends in 1855, and is praised by R. W. Dixon, who heard it, as almost equal to anything he ever afterwards did'. Morris's own remark, "Well, if this is poetry, it is very easy to write," is memorable. Facility was at once his gift and his danger: there are over 42,000 lines in The Earthly Paradise. More of his poems appeared in The Oxford and Cambridge Maga 1 Mackail's Life of Morris, i. 52. Mr Robert Bridges, however, in a note to Selected Poems of R. W. Dixon, declares that the poem still exists, and that it "abundantly refutes the notion that he appeared on that occasion as a fullfledged poet." |