A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

Oh! exquisite malady of the soul,How hast thou marred me —

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

Of a dreamer who slumbers,And a singer who sings no more.

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

This melancholy story is to be found sufficiently reflected in his works. Those in prose, though not contemptible, neither deserve nor are likely to receive long remembrance, being for the most part critical studies, animated by a real love for literature and informed by respectable knowledge, but of necessity lacking in strict scholarship, distinguished by more acuteness than wisdom, and marred by the sectarian violence and narrowness of a small anti-orthodox clique. They may perhaps be not unfairly compared to the work of a clever but ill-conditioned schoolboy. The verse is very different. He began to write it early, and it chiefly appeared in Mr. Bradlaugh's National Reformer with the signature "B. V.," the initials of "Bysshe Vanolis," a rather characteristic nom de guerre which Thomson had taken to express his admiration for Shelley directly, and for Novalis by anagram. Some of it, however, emerged into a wider hearing, and attracted the favourable attention of men like Kingsley and Froude. But Thomson did nothing of importance till 1874, when "The City of Dreadful Night" appeared in the National Reformer, to the no small bewilderment probably of its readers. Six years later the poem was printed with others in a volume, quickly followed by a second, Vane's Story, etc. Thomson's melancholy death attracted fresh attention to him, and much – perhaps a good deal too much – of his writings has been republished since. His claims, however, must rest on a comparatively small body of work, which will no doubt one day be selected and issued alone. "The City of Dreadful Night" itself, incomparably the best of the longer poems, is a pessimist and nihilist effusion of the deepest gloom amounting to despair, but couched in stately verse of an absolute sincerity and containing some splendid passages. With this is connected one of the latest pieces, the terrible "Insomnia." Of lighter strain, written when the poet could still be happy, are "Sunday at Hampstead" and "Sunday up the River," "The Naked Goddess," and one or two others; while other things, such as "The fire that filled my heart of old," must also be cited. Even against these the charge of a monotonous, narrow, and irrational misery has been brought. But what saves Thomson is the perfection with which he expresses, the negative and hopeless side of the sense of mystery, of the Unseen; just as Miss Rossetti expresses the positive and hopeful one. No two contemporary poets perhaps ever completed each other in a more curious way than this Bohemian atheist and this devout lady.

So far in this chapter the story of poetry, from Tennyson downwards, has been conducted in regular fashion, and by citing the principal names which represent the chief schools or sub-schools. But we must now return to notice a very considerable company of other verse-writers, without mention of whom this history would be wofully incomplete. Nor must it by any means be supposed that they are to be regarded invariably as constituting a "second class." On the contrary, some of them are the equals, one or two the superiors, of Thomson or of O'Shaughnessy. But they have been postponed, either because they belong to schools of which the poets already mentioned are masters, to choruses of which others are the leaders, or because they show rather blended influences than a distinct and direct advance in the main poetical line of development. Others again rank here, and not earlier, because they are of the second class, or a lower one.

Of these, though he leaves a name certain to live in English literary history, if not perhaps quite in the way in which its author wished, is Martin Farquhar Tupper, who was born, in 1810, of a very respectable family in the Channel Islands, his father being a surgeon of eminence. Tupper was educated at the Charterhouse and at Christ Church, and was called to the bar. But he gave himself up to literature, especially poetry or verse, of which he wrote an enormous quantity. His most famous book appeared originally in 1839, though it was afterwards continued. It was called Proverbial Philosophy, and criticised life in rhythmical rather than metrical lines, with a great deal of orthodoxy. Almost from the first the critics and the wits waged unceasing war against it; but the public, at least for many years, bought it with avidity, and perhaps read it, so that it went through forty editions and is said to have brought in twenty thousand pounds. Nor is it at all certain that any genuine conception of its pretentious triviality had much to do with the decay which, after many years, it, like other human things, experienced. Mr. Tupper, who did not die till 1889, is understood to have been privately an amiable and rather accomplished person; and some of his innumerable minor copies of verse attain a very fair standard of minor poetry. But Proverbial Philosophy remains as one of the bright and shining examples of the absolute want of connection between literary merit and popular success.

It has been said that Lord Tennyson's first work appeared in Poems by Two Brothers, and it is now known that this book was actually by the three, – Frederick, Charles, and Alfred. Frederick, the eldest, who, at a great age, is still alive, has never ceased verse-writing. Charles, who afterwards took the name of Turner, and, having been born in 1808, died in 1879, was particularly famous as a sonneteer, producing in this form many good and some excellent examples. Arthur Hallam, whom In Memoriam has made immortal, was credited by the partial judgment of his friends with talents which, they would fain think, were actually shown both in verse and prose. A wiser criticism will content itself with saying that in one sense he produced In Memoriam itself, and that this is enough connection with literature for any man. His own work has a suspicious absence of faults, without the presence of any great positive merit, – a combination almost certainly indicating precocity, to be followed by sterility. But this consummation he was spared. John Sterling, who has been already referred to, and who stands to Carlyle in what may be called a prose version of the relation between Tennyson and Hallam, wrote some verse which is at least interesting; and Sir Francis Doyle, also elsewhere mentioned, belongs to the brood of the remarkable years 1807-14, having been born in 1810. But his splendid war-songs were written not very early in life.

Of the years just mentioned, the first, 1807, contributed, besides Mr. Frederick Tennyson, the very considerable talent of Archbishop Trench, a Harrow and Trinity (Cambridge) man who had an actual part in the expedition to Spain from which Sterling retreated, took orders, and ended a series of ecclesiastical promotions by the Archbishopric of Dublin, to which he was consecrated in 1864, which he held with great dignity and address during the extremely trying period of Disestablishment, and which he resigned in 1884, dying two years later. Trench wrote always well, and always as a scholar, on a wide range of subjects. He was an interesting philologist, – his Study of Words being the most popular of scholarly and the most scholarly of popular works on the subject, – a valuable introducer of the exquisite sacred Latin poetry of the Middle Ages to Englishmen, a sound divine in preaching and teaching. His original English verse was chiefly written before the middle of the century, though perhaps his best known (not his best) verses are on the Battle of the Alma. He was a good sonneteer and an excellent hymn-writer.

1809 contributed three writers of curiously contrasted character. One was Professor Blackie, an eccentric and amiable man, a translator of Æschylus, and a writer of songs of a healthy and spirited kind. The second, Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, a poet of Parables, has never been popular, and perhaps seldom arrived at that point of projection in which poetical alchemy finally and successfully transmutes the rebel materials of thought and phrase into manifest gold; but he had very high and distinctly rare, poetical qualities. Such things as "Old Souls," "The Snake Charmer," "The Palmist," three capital examples of his work, are often, and not quite wrongly, objected to in different forms of some such a phrase as this: "Poetry that is perfect poetry ought never to subject any tolerable intellect to the necessity of searching for its meaning. It is not necessary that it should yield up the whole treasures of that meaning at once, but it must carry on the face of it such a competent quantity as will relieve the reader from postponing the poetic enjoyment in order to solve the intellectual riddle." The truth of this in the main, and the demurrers and exceptions to it in part, are pretty clear; nor is this the place to state them at length. It is sufficient to say that in Dr. Hake's verse, especially that part of it published between 1870 and 1880 under the titles Madeline, Parables and Tales, New Symbols, Legends of the Morrow and Maiden Ecstasy, the reader of some poetical experience will seldom fail to find satisfaction.

It is impossible to imagine a greater contrast than that of this poet with Lord Houghton, earlier known to everybody as Richard Monckton Milnes, who died in 1885. He was of the golden age of Trinity during this century, the age of Tennyson, and throughout life he had an amiable fancy for making the acquaintance of everybody who made any name in literature, and of many who made none. A practical and active politician, and a constant figure in society, he was also a very considerable man of letters. His critical work (principally but not wholly collected in Monographs) is not great in bulk but is exceedingly good, both in substance and in style. His verse, on the other hand, which was chiefly the produce of the years before he came to middle life, is a little slight, and perhaps appears slighter than it really is. Few poets have ever been more successful with songs for music: the "Brookside" (commonly called from its refrain, "The beating of my own heart"), the famous and really fine "Strangers Yet," are the best known, but there are many others. Lord Houghton undoubtedly had no strong vein of poetry. But it was always an entire mistake to represent him as either a fribble or a sentimentalist, while with more inducements to write he would probably have been one of the very best critics of his age.

It is necessary once more to approach the unsatisfactory brevity of a catalogue in order to mention, since it would be wrong to omit, Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-86), an Irish writer who produced some pleasant and spirited work of ordinary kinds, and laboured very hard to achieve that often tried but seldom achieved adventure, the rendering into English poetry of Irish Celtic legends and literature; Alfred Domett (1811-87), author of the New Zealand epic of Ranulf and Amohia and much other verse, but most safely grappled to English poetry as Browning's "Waring"; W. B. Scott (1812-90), an outlying member of the Præ-Raphaelite School in art and letters, in whom for the most part execution lagged behind conception both with pen and pencil; Charles Mackay (1814-89), an active journalist who wrote a vast deal in verse and prose, his best things perhaps being the mid-century "Cholera Chant," the once well-known song of "A good time coming," and in a sentimental strain the piece called "O, ye Tears"; and Mrs. Archer Clive, the author of the remarkable novel of Paul Ferroll, whose IX. Poems by V. attracted much attention from competent critics in the doubtful time of poetry about the middle of the century, and are really good.

Not many writers, either in prose or poetry, give the impression of never having done what was in them more than William Edmonstoune Aytoun, who was born in 1813 and died in 1865. He was a son-in-law of "Christopher North," and like him a pillar of Blackwood's Magazine, in which some of his best things in prose and verse appeared. He divided himself between law and literature, and in his rather short life rose to a Professorship in the latter and a Sheriffdom in the former, deserving the credit of admirably stimulating influence in the first capacity and competent performance in the second. He published poems when he was only seventeen. But his best work consists of the famous Bon Gaultier Ballads– a collection of parodies and light poems of all kinds written in conjunction with Sir Theodore Martin, and one of the pleasantest books of the kind that the century has seen – and the more serious Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, both dating from the forties, the satirically curious Firmilian (see below), 1854, and some Blackwood stories of which the very best perhaps is The Glenmutchkin Railway. His long poem of Bothwell, 1855, and his novel of Norman Sinclair, 1861, are less successful.

The Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, on which his chief serious claim must rest, is an interesting book, if hardly a great one. The style is modelled with extreme closeness upon that of Scott, which even Sir Walter, with all his originality and genius, had not been able always to preserve from flatness. In Aytoun's hands the flats are too frequent, though they are relieved and broken at times by really splendid bursts, the best of which perhaps are "The Island of the Scots" and "The Heart of the Bruce." For Aytoun's poetic vein, except in the lighter kinds, was of no very great strength; and an ardent patriotism, a genuine and gallant devotion to the Tory cause, and a keen appreciation of the chivalrous and romantic, did not always suffice to supply the want of actual inspiration.

If it had been true, as is commonly said, that the before-mentioned Firmilian killed the so-called Spasmodic School, Aytoun's failure to attain the upper regions of poetry would have been a just judgment; for the persons whom he satirised, though less clever and humorous, were undoubtedly more poetical than himself. But nothing is ever killed in this way, and as a matter of fact the Spasmodic School of the early fifties was little more than one of the periodical outbursts of poetic velleity, more genuine than vigorous and more audacious than organic, which are constantly witnessed. It is, as usual, not very easy to find out who were the supposed scholars in this school. Mr. P. H. Bailey, the author of Festus, who still survives, is sometimes classed with them; but the chief members are admitted to have been Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith, both remarkable persons, both failures of something which might in each case have been a considerable poet, and both illustrating the "second middle" period of the poetry of the century which corresponds to that illustrated earlier by Darley, Horne, and Beddoes.

Of this pair, Sydney Dobell had some, and Alexander Smith had others, of the excuses which charity not divorced from critical judgment makes for imperfect poets. Dobell, with sufficient leisure for poetical production, had a rather unfortunate education and exceedingly bad health. Smith had something of both of these, and the necessity of writing for bread as well. Dobell, the elder of the two, and the longer lived, though both died comparatively young, was a Kentish man, born at Cranbrook on 5th April 1824. When he was of age his father established himself as a wine-merchant at Cheltenham, and Sydney afterwards exercised the same not unpoetical trade. He went to no school and to no University, privations especially dangerous to a person inclined as he was to a kind of passionate priggishness. He was always ill; and his wife, to whom he engaged himself while a boy, and whom he married before he had ceased to be one, was always ill likewise. He travelled a good deal, with results more beneficial to his poetry than to his health; and, the latter becoming ever worse, he died near Cheltenham on 22nd August 1874. His first work, an "Italomaniac" closet drama entitled The Roman, was published in 1850; his second, Balder, in 1853. This latter has been compared to Ibsen's Brand: I do not know whether any one has noticed other odd, though slight, resemblances between Peer Gynt and Beddoes' chief work. The Crimean War had a strong influence on Dobell, and besides joining Smith in Sonnets on the War (1855), he wrote by himself England in Time of War, next year. He did not publish anything else; but his works were edited shortly after his death by Professor Nichol.

Alexander Smith, like so many of the modern poets of Scotland, was born in quite humble life, and had not even the full advantages open to a Scottish "lad o' pairts." His birthplace, however, was Kilmarnock, a place not alien to the Muses; and before he was twenty-one (his birth year is diversely given as 1829 and 1830) the Rev. George Gilfillan, an amiable and fluent critic of the middle of the century, who loved literature very much and praised its practitioners with more zeal than discrimination, procured the publication of the Life Drama. It sold enormously; it is necessary to have been acquainted with those who were young at the time of its appearance to believe in the enthusiasm with which it was received; but a little intelligence and a very little goodwill will enable the critic to understand, if not to share their raptures. For a time Smith was deliberately pitted against Tennyson by "the younger sort" as Dennis says of the faction for Settle against Dryden in his days at Cambridge. The reaction which, mercifully for the chances of literature if not quite pleasantly for the poet, always comes in such cases, was pretty rapid, and Smith, ridiculed in Firmilian, was more seriously taxed with crudity (which was just), plagiarism (which was absurd), and want of measure (which, like the crudity, can hardly be denied). Smith, however, was not by any means a weakling except physically; he could even satirise himself sensibly and good-humouredly enough; and his popularity had the solid result of giving him a post in the University of Edinburgh – not lucrative and by no means a sinecure, but not too uncongenial, and allowing him a chance both to read and to write. For some time he stuck to poetry, publishing City Poems in 1857 and Edwin of Deira in 1861. But the taste for his wares had dwindled: perhaps his own poetic impulse, a true but not very strong one, was waning; and he turned to prose, in which he produced a story or two and some pleasant descriptive work —Dreamthorpe (1863), and A Summer in Skye (1865). Consumption showed itself, and he died on 8th January 1867.

It has already been said that there is much less of a distinct brotherhood in Dobell and Smith, or of any membership of a larger but special "Spasmodic school," than of the well-known and superficially varying but generally kindred spirit of periods and persons in which and in whom poetic yearning does not find organs or opportunities thoroughly suited to satisfy itself. Dobell is the more unequal, but the better of the two in snatches. His two most frequently quoted things – "Tommy's Dead" and the untitled ballad where the refrain —

Oh, Keith of Ravelston,The sorrows of thy line!

occurs at irregular intervals – are for once fair samples of their author's genius. "Tommy's dead," the lament of a father over his son, is too long, it has frequent flatnesses, repetitions that do not add to the effect, bits of mere gush, trivialities. The tragic and echoing magnificence of the Ravelston refrain is not quite seconded by the text: both to a certain extent deserve the epithet (which I have repudiated for Beddoes in another place) of "artificial." And yet both have the fragmentary, not to be analysed, almost uncanny charm and grandeur which have been spoken of in that place. Nor do this charm, this grandeur, fail to reappear (always more or less closely accompanied by the faults just mentioned, and also by a kind of flatulent rant which is worse than any of them) both in Dobell's war-songs, which may be said in a way to hand the torch on from Campbell to Mr. Kipling, and in his marvellously unequal blank verse, where the most excellent thought and phrase alternate with sheer balderdash – a pun which (it need hardly be said) was not spared by contemporary critics to the author of Balder.

Alexander Smith never rises to the heights nor strikes the distinct notes of Dobell; but the Life Drama is really on the whole better than either Balder or The Roman, and is full of what may be called, from opposite points of view, happy thoughts and quaint conceits, expressed in a stamp of verse certainly not quite original, but melodious always, and sometimes very striking. He has not yet had his critical resurrection, and perhaps none such will ever exalt him to a very high prominent position. He seems to suffer from the operation of that mysterious but very real law which decrees that undeserved popularity shall be followed by neglect sometimes even more undeserved. But when he does finally find his level, it will not be a very low one.

To the Spasmodics may be appended yet another list of bards who can claim here but the notice of a sentence or a clause, though by no means uninteresting to the student, and often very interesting indeed to the student-lover of poetry: – the two Joneses – Ernest (1819-69), a rather silly victim of Chartism, for which he went to prison, but a generous person and master of a pretty twitter enough; and Ebenezer (1820-60), a London clerk, author of Studies of Sensation and Event, a rather curious link between the Cockney school of the beginning of the century and some minor poets of our own times, but overpraised by his rediscoverers some years ago; W. C. Bennett, a popular song-writer; William Cory ( -1892), earlier and better known as Johnson, an Eton master, a scholar, an admirable writer of prose and in Ionica of verse slightly effeminate but with a note in it not unworthy of one glance of its punning title; W. C. Roscoe (1823-59), grandson of the historian, a minor poet in the best sense of the term; William Allingham (1824-89), sometime editor of Fraser, and a writer of verse from whom at one time something might have been expected; Thomas Woolner, a sculptor of great, and – in My Beautiful Lady, Pygmalion, etc. – a poet of estimable merit, whose first-named volume attracted rather disproportionate praise at its first appearance. As one thinks of the work of these and others – often enjoyable, sometimes admirable, and long ago or later admired and enjoyed – the unceremoniousness of despatching them so slightly brings a twinge of shame. But it is impossible to do justice to their work, or to the lyrics, merry or sensuous, of Mortimer Collins, who was nearly a real poet of vers de société, and had a capital satiric and a winning romantic touch; the stirring ballads of Walter Thornbury (which, however, would hardly have been written but for Macaulay on the one hand and Barham on the other) and the ill-conditioned but clever Radical railing of Robert Brough at "Gentlemen." But if they cannot be discussed, they shall at least be mentioned. On three others, Frederick Locker, Arthur Hugh Clough, and "Owen Meredith" (Lord Lytton), we must dwell longer.