Essays

The following may stand as instances of his failure in precise delineation. In the very first stanza of the book we have:

Hues of the rich unfolding morn,That ere the glorious sun be born,.....Around his path are taught to swell.

"Swell" is a property of bulk or sound, surely not of light? Again,

addressing the breeze, he says:

Wakenest each little leaf to sing.

This is purely conventional; how different from the "laurel's pattering talk" of Tennyson. Again:

The torrent rillThat winds unseen beneath the shaggy fell,Touched by the blue mist well.

How weak a word to end a stanza! Again:

The birds of heaven before us fleet,They cannot brook our shame to meet.

How falsetto, how prejudiced a tone! And these are not isolated instances: similar infelicities occur on every page.

Keble's whole view of Nature, it must be said, was onesided and wanting in insight. Nature was to him nothing but a type of mild fervour and uncomplaining patience. "All true, all faultless, all in tune," he says. To the cruelty, the waste, the ugliness, that seem so inextricably intertwined with natural processes, he diligently closed his eyes. Thus, in No. 9 of the Lyra Innocentium he propagates a host of innocent superstitions as to the power of childhood over wild beasts. It surely is not poetical to say of a baby:

The tiger's whelp encaged with theeWould sheathe his claws to sport and play;Bees have for thee no sting.

because it is not true.

Again, in the beautiful stanzas on the Second Sunday after Trinity, he sees "the many-twinkling smile of ocean" up the glade. His only thought is:

Such signs of love old Ocean givesWe cannot choose but think he lives.

An agreeable view, but hardly consistent with the vast and barren cruelties which are as natural to the ocean as his genial presence.

We do not mean that a poet is bound to insist on the harsher aspects of the case, but in a poet like Keble, who made so much of close communion with Nature, of intimate musings, it is mere blindness not to take these things into account. The fault, with Keble, was entirely in man's corrupt heart; further than that he did not care to follow it; he deliberately ignored the bewildering anomaly, the law of failure and suffering that runs through Nature, as surely as through the history of nations. How different a view it was from the view that Tennyson found grow more and more intense with advancing years – that the world was, as it were, the creation of some vast poetic heart, with its necessary concomitant of failure and incompleteness.

Keble himself, in his "Prælectiones Academicæ," or lectures delivered as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and in his review of the "Life of Sir Walter Scott" (British Critic, 1838), enunciated a theory of poetry which it will be well to examine. Dean Church said of the former work, that it was "the most original and memorable course ever delivered from the Chair of Poetry in Oxford"; but the statement does not imply any very extravagant claims. Again, Bishop Moberly said that the book exhibited "a power and delicacy at once so original and so just, as to make these lectures one of the most charming and valuable volumes of classical criticism that have ever issued from the press." Allowing for all possible partiality, this is strong praise; but it is difficult to see how it is justified. As to its critical value we may say at once that no one was ever less fitted to be a critic than Keble. "What Keble hated instinctively," says Newman, "was heresy, insubordination, resistance to things established, claims of independence, disloyalty, innovation, a critical and censorious spirit." That is an indifferent outfit for a poet, and an impossible one for a critic. And even granting to Keble a certain submissive acumen, a certain relish for masterpieces, criticism which deals only with the panegyric of great masters, or the classification of established reputations is surely the most valueless of all criticism. If it is presented in attractive literary form it merely diverts to itself the attention it professes to direct elsewhere! If it is elucidatory, it is excusable: but Keble is not elucidatory. The only true function of criticism is the judicial and tentative selection of contemporary excellence. Artistic impulse, literary progress, poetical production, have orbits of their own. Depreciative criticism is nothing more than a kind of attendant umbra, and has never done more than retard, if it has done even that, the popular verdict. Dr. Johnson was perfectly right when he said, "Depend upon it, sir, no man was ever written down but by himself." The criticism of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, brilliant in form, retrograde in spirit, made a few writers uncomfortable and gave a malicious pleasure to a great number of readers: but poetical creation continued its calm advance quite independently. Nay, they even overshot their mark and called attention to the very writers they professed to crush. Had the reviewers had their way, we should have heard no more of Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Tennyson. The only valuable criticism is the unprejudiced republican criticism, that dares to see what is good and give instant encouragement to it. And Keble's is just the opposite, as might be expected from the whole tone and habit of his mind. A cautious appeal to authority, predetermined canons of taste and propriety – these are his characteristics.

He enunciates the theory which would divide all poets into primary and secondary poets. "Primary poets, according to Keble," says Principal Shairp, "are they who are driven by overmastering enthusiasm, by passionate devotion to some range of objects, or line of thought, or aspect of life or Nature, to utter their feelings in song. They sing because they cannot help it… This is the true poetic μανἱα of which Plato speaks. Secondary poets are not urged to poetry by any such overflowing sentiment: but learning, admiration, choice and a certain literary turn have made them poetic artists." Of the former kind are Homer, Æschylus, Lucretius, Virgil, Pindar, Shakespeare, Burns, Scott: of the latter, Sophocles, Milton, Dryden, Horace, and Theocritus. This, in itself, is a somewhat singular selection of names. But what absence of insight is there in Keble's judgment that the Iliad and Odyssey are the work of one hand, the former in youth, the latter in later life. "The overmastering feeling of Homer," he says, "is a sad regret for the decay of the heroic age, with its common national feeling, its reverence for its leaders." What a fantastic judgment! Homer the poet of a sad regret! Surely it is the very absence of all critical or introspective or even latent thought which gives the poems their overwhelming charm.

The truth is that Keble's theory of poetry is practically an expansion of Aristotle's Poetics, and is a narrow generalisation on wholly insufficient grounds. Poets cannot be swept off the board entire, like chessmen. There are many writers of verse, whose impulse to sing was certainly original, and, according to Keble's definition, primary; yet their work was essentially second-rate. Take such a poet as Southey: he composed in a mood which he mistook for solemn inspiration; his poetry was written in obedience to a high and sacred sense of vocation; he – in a letter which cannot be called conceited, for it is written with a serene and stately consciousness of greatness – placed his own poem of Madoc second only to Milton's Paradise Lost. Wordsworth again – writing sometimes from a large and grave inspiration, sometimes from a sense of duty – was he always a primary poet? The fact is that it is almost entirely a matter of expression and style. Many men are poets at heart, and have a vivid and eager consciousness of beauty, but only a small percentage of these have the gift of transmuting it into language. The truth is that secondary poets are mere literary men, dilettanti verse-writers; and all poets who establish a real hold on the minds of others, if it be, as Lovelace, by two lyrics only, or Shirley by one, are primary poets. The thing cannot be done at all without a genuine inspiration; but granted the inspiration, even the mood, the expression is not always there.

Keble, says Principal Shairp, was, when tested by his own theory, a primary poet – that is, his impulse and treatment were alike original. The former of these statements may be granted with certain reservations: The Christian Year is an original book. The idea was an original one and a happy one, though Heber had made a similar attempt. To assign to each of the seasons of the Church a devotional commentary; to enrich the austere and narrow melody of the ecclesiastical tone – running, like its own plain-song, with a severe and plaintive monotony – with chord upon chord of rich and suggestive philosophy, was no ignoble thought. Indeed, the most apt comparison that can be found for Keble is to consider him as a skilful musician, embroidering and enlarging with intricate harmonies, a series of strict and uniform subjects. It is not, indeed, the highest form of art, but it gives scope for the exercise of a wide and tender skill. But Keble had no really original impulse; he required to have his ground-bass found for him, and he could construct a descant of admirable softness and delicacy, while underneath moved the solemn and measured music of the ancient tradition.

As to the originality of the form which he employed, it is impossible to agree with Principal Shairp; indeed, he vitiates his whole case by comparing Keble to George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. Was ever a more inapt comparison made? To begin with, Keble was neither a mystic nor even a symbolist. With George Herbert, and even more with Henry Vaughan, the outward sign, the ordinance, the ornaments of religion were weak and faint foreshadowings of some distant glory, some vast truth dimly understood. But to Keble the form, the ceremony, the material detail of service and sacrament were far too real and desirable. An instance of this is to be found in the poem on Holy Baptism.

Where is it mothers learn their love?In every church a fountain springs,O'er which the Eternal DoveHovers on softest wings.

What a failure of human perception! It is said that Wordsworth, once reading with admiration the above-mentioned poem, stumbled at the lines I have quoted – the statement that mothers learn their love at the font. "No, no," said the old poet, "it is from their own maternal hearts." Henry Vaughan could never have been betrayed into so intimately unreal a statement as this.

Again, as to technical treatment and form, it would be difficult to select two poets so utterly and radically unlike as George Herbert and Keble. The only point of resemblance is that they are both sometimes unnecessarily obscure; but in George Herbert's case this arises from a curious elaboration of expression, an intensity of compression, an omission of logical steps, a tendency to cram a sentence into a word; while in Keble's case, his obscurity arises from a kind of indefinite garrulity, a tendency to divergence on side issues, a vapid displacement of language.

The eye in smiles may wander round,Caught by earth's shadows as they fleet,But for the soul no help is foundSave Him who made it, meet.

What could be more inartistic than the disarrangement of the last two lines? No, the strength of Keble lies in the gentle lucidity of many of his finest poems, never in the arresting force of his epithets, never in intricate and ingenious conceits of language.

The real prototypes of Keble in English literature are Gray and Wordsworth. Keble on more than one occasion echoes the stately and majestic cadence of Gray. Could such a stanza as the following have been written without the example of the "Elegy"?

Why should we faint and fear to live alone,Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die?Not even the tenderest heart and next our ownKnows half the reasons why we smile and sigh.

And again, from the "Second Sunday after Easter":

In outline dim and vastTheir fearful shadows castThe giant forms of empires, on their wayTo ruin: one by one,They tower and they are gone —Yet in the Prophet's soul the dreams of avarice stay.....He watched till morning's rayOn lake and meadow lay,And willow-shaded streams, that silent sweepAround the banner'd lines,Where, by their several signs,The desert-wearied tribes in sight of Canaan sleep.

These sober, grave stanzas have something of the cadence of The Bard. The resemblance to Wordsworth is more general, but it may be said that the tone, the structure, the language of many of Keble's lyrics, the background of Nature in which his thoughts enact their part, the presence of skies and woods and waters, of which he is for ever conscious, for which he is ever grateful, however inaccurately observed and sketched, his innate love of old, traditional, wholesome things, "our peace, our fearful innocence, and pure religion breathing household laws" – all these make Keble a true Wordsworthian.

The qualities of style to which I propose to call attention in Keble are – (1) simplicity; (2) propriety; (3) gravity – all three unpopular qualities enough nowadays, and, therefore, perhaps all the more worthy of study. (1) Simplicity, artistic simplicity, is a noble thing, and as rare as it is noble; it must be beyond and above ornateness; anciently, indeed, before literature had begun to knit her infinite combinations, it was more attainable; but now to be unstudied is to be thin. Art must now be "careless with artful care, affecting to be unaffected." Modern simplicity must show the spareness of asceticism, not the leanness of anæmia. It must arise from the repression of luxuriance, not poverty of spirit; strict simplicity implies the rejection of all startling and glittering tricks of style, and consequently it implies a lordly patience in pursuit, with an indefatigable zeal for the selection of the precise, the majestic, the supreme.

I do not say that Keble was always successful in the pursuit of simplicity. But it was his object all through. Outside the Christian Year, indeed, in the Lyra Innocentium the studied avoidance of the ornamental and the attractive, degenerated into vapid debility. But in the "Morning" and "Evening" poems:

Only, O Lord, in Thy dear love,Fit us for perfect rest above,And help us, this and every day,To live more nearly as we pray.

and —

If some poor wandering child of ThineHave spurned to-day the Voice Divine,Now Lord, the gracious work begin:Let him no more lie down in sin.

have the true note of pure directness; how, in the middle of so sweet and low a strain, such a stanza as —

The Rulers of this Christian land,'Twixt Thee and us ordained to stand —Guide Thou their course, O Lord, aright,Let all do all as in Thy sight.

could be intruded, shows us how uncritical, how helpless Keble could be.

Again, consider such a poem as that for the "Second Sunday after

Easter," quoted above,

O for a sculptor's hand, &c.

and some of the stanzas on "St. Matthew's Day":

There are in this loud stunning tideOf human care and crime,With whom the melodies abideOf the everlasting chime,Who carry music in their heartThrough dusky lane and wrangling mart,Plying their daily task with busier feet,Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat;

and again for "Septuagesima":

There is a book who runs may read, &c.

and what is perhaps the finest of all his lyrics, that for "Whitsunday":

When God of old came down from Heaven,In power and wrath He came:Before His feet the clouds were riven,Half darkness and half flame.Around the trembling mountain's baseThe prostrate people lay,A day of wrath and not of grace,A dim and dreadful day.

These have the authentic note of grandeur. They are lines that take the heart and imagination captive, and linger in the memory unbidden. It may be, of course, that some of them are consecrated by familiar use, by being connected with moments of emotion and resolution. What an immense, what a sacred power, these writers of liturgical poems wield! but, on the other hand, such familiarity is apt to blind us also to excellence of style. No, the claim of genuine, severe simplicity may be sustained for Keble.

(2) Propriety. – I am using the word, of course, in the extended sense of delicate appositeness, not as the reverse of impropriety. – Keble has a wonderful power, without tricks of rhetoric, of touching in some natural homely feeling with exquisite grace. How could the instinctive dislike of change in familiar surroundings be more pathetically described than in the poem for Whit Monday?

Since all that is not Heaven must fade,Light be the hand of Ruin laidUpon the home I love.With lulling spell let soft decaySteal on, and spare the giant sway,The crash of tower and grove.

In such a mood it is so easy to be jealous, to be vindictive, to lose the central thought in invective or unconvincing particularisation.

Again, in a frame of mind that easily drifts into morbidity and despondency, with what pure patience he delineates the vague languors, the unutterable discontents of the soft days of early spring, in the poem for the third Sunday after Easter:

Well may I guess and feelWhy autumn should be sad,But vernal airs should sorrow heal,Spring should be gay and glad.Yet as along this violet bank I rove,The languid sweetness seems to choke my breath,I sit me down beside the hazel grove,And sigh, and half could wish my weariness were death.

And what could be more supremely delicate, more touched with a loving humiliation, than the exquisite line (in the poem on Gunpowder Treason, of all places!),

Speak gently of our sister's fall.

(3) Gravity. – This may be held perhaps to be almost a defect of quality; but in Keble it has a positive value. He, a clerical Wordsworth, so to speak, moved through the world, not indeed without some simple merriment, but without a suspicion of the existence of that deeper and larger mood that we name humour. He never cared to note the odd, bewildering contradictions of humanity, its reckless absurdities, its profound and intimate mirth. Keble's smile, and he is said to have had one, was the grave, bright smile of the contented and joyful spirit, not the secret and refreshing twinkle of the humourist. Indeed, the spirit sickens to recall the pieces resolutely labelled humorous, which have been shamefully made public among his miscellaneous poems. If these were specimens of the wit in which his talk is said to have abounded, it is a matter for deep thankfulness that so few reminiscences of his conversation have survived.

Life was far too serious and momentous to Keble for him to have enjoyed its pitiful contrasts. The only consolations indeed that can prevent a spirit, bounded by so petty a horizon, from becoming sullen or bitter, are perennial humour or intense seriousness. And Keble was as serious as Shelley or Wordsworth. It is not a quality that needs defining by quotation, for every single poem in the Christian Year is penetrated with it from the first line to the last. But in these days, when the issues of life and death, the intricacies of character, the logical truth of fatalism, are matters of after-dinner conversation, it is well to live a little with a mind to whom they were absorbing and fearful realities, too deep for laughter or tears. Keble's inmost instinct was not love, or the sense of beauty, but a resolute and puritanical sternness. He made the mistake, so common to religious spirits, of supposing that the religious instinct is universally implanted, and that whatever the varying quantities of intellect and capacity in an individual, the spiritual faculties are evenly distributed.

Well, such an attitude, if unsympathetic and statuesque, is noble and admirable. It is the temper in which great deeds are done and heroic resolutions formed. It seals Keble one of that honourable minority who clearly see the force of a moral ideal, maintain it in themselves, and demand it from others; and if it is difficult to sympathise with it, it is impossible not to admire it.

It may be urged, then, that on these three grounds Keble may be reckoned among English poets. It will not be on these grounds that he will be most read, but for his pure and sober religious spirit, about which indeed much might be said that would be foreign to the purpose of this essay. But it may be granted that he had a strong perception of beauty, moral and physical, in spite of a certain rigidity of tone; and that he had style, the gift of expression, an artistic ideal, without which no purity of outlook, no exultant sense of beauty, can make a poet. But even if his claim cannot be sustained, even if his writings were not poetry, we may be thankful that for more than half a century there have been spirits so high, so refined, so devoted, as to have been misled by his spiritual ardour, the lofty sublimity of his ideal, as to mistake his refined and enthusiastic utterance for the voice of the genuine bard.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

IT is a matter of regret that there is no adequate biography of one of the very few women who have achieved real eminence in literature. Mrs. Richmond Ritchie has indeed written an article in the Dictionary of National Biography, but this from the nature of things could not be much more than a record. In the series of Eminent Women, Mr. Ingram has attempted to supply the want, and after reading his book through more than once we are bound to say that we regret that he has been first in the field. However, as Mrs. Browning herself says, "we get no good by being ungenerous, even to a book."

When Horne in the New Spirit of the Age gave some biographical particulars about Miss Barrett to the public, she wrote to him as follows: – "My dear Mr. Horne, the public do not care for me enough to care at all for my biography. If you say anything of me (and I am not affected enough to pretend to wish you to be absolutely silent, if you see any occasion to speak) it must be as a writer of rhymes, and not as the heroine of a biography. And then as to stories, my story amounts to the knife-grinder's, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cage could have as good a story. Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have passed in thoughts." And again later, when the paper had appeared: – "You are my friend I hope, but you do not on that account lose the faculty of judging me or the right of judging me frankly. I do loathe the whole system of personal compliment as a consequence of personal interest… I set more price on your sincerity than on your praise, and consider it more closely connected with the quality called kindness… I want kindness, the rarest of all nearly – which is truth."

Those are Mrs. Browning's own deliberate views, written it is true in early life, as to her own biography. That a biography need not be critical has been amply proved by Boswell; on the other hand, this only applies to a biography written by a contemporary friend, and even then it must be absolutely faithful. Boswell, it is true, admired too deeply to criticise. If he ever thought his subject ungenerous, ungenial, tyrannical, he does not say so; but at least he does not shrink from recording experiences which might suggest those qualities to readers who did not admire as he did. But any one who sits down to trace the history of one with whom he had no personal acquaintance, when that life is closed by death and rounded by the past, is bound to make some effort to discriminate. In Mr. Ingram's book the quality of discrimination is conspicuously wanting. He has evidently conceived an ideal and done his best to transmit it to others. That he has not altogether succeeded in disguising his heroine is no fault of his; as Miss Barrett complains in another sentence of the letter from which we have been quoting – "he has rouged her up to the eyes."

We must only touch upon two or three of the most salient points of Mrs. Browning's biography. Her life was uneventful enough, as far as events go, and its outlines are sufficiently well known. The impression which it leaves upon a reader is strangely mixed. The intellect with which we are brought into contact is profoundly impressive; the spectacle of a life so vivid and untiring, so hopeful and ardent, lived under the pressure of constant physical suffering, and the still more marked presence of morbidity both of thought and feeling, is inspiring and moving. But there is a want of wholesomeness about a great deal of it; there is a sense of failure somewhere. This reveals itself in its concrete form perhaps most clearly in the fact that with all the presence of high and animating thoughts, with the resolve of self-dedication to the poetic office, with the assiduous and systematic labour to cultivate the art of expression, yet obscurity seems to haunt so many efforts, and the instinct of discrimination so frequently appears to slumber. Mrs. Browning as a letter-writer is disappointing; again and again there is a touch of true feeling, a noble thought, but with all this there is a want of incisiveness, a wearisome seriousness, which of all qualities is the one that ought not to obtrude itself, a strange lack of humour, a certain strain – a scraping of the soul, as Tourgenieff has it. And this may, we think, be best expressed by the pathetic words that fall from her in the letter already quoted: her history was that of a bird in a cage. Not only from the physical fact that she was for many years of her life an invalid – but mentally and morally also she was caged, by imaginary social fictions, by certain ingrained habits of thought; and, last of all, as a passionate idealist, she saw with painful persistence and in horrible contrast the infinite possibilities of human nature and the limitations of low realities.