Magazines and Essayists.
Magazines, critical, literary, social, and antiquarian magazines, had flourished in the later years of the eighteenth century. With the nineteenth, in 1802, appeared "The Edinburgh Review," critical and political, edited by Francis Jeffrey (born at Edinburgh, 1773, died 1850). Though a man of ability and of a crackling kind of cleverness, Jeffrey was wholly incompetent to criticize the works of the great romantic poets, the chief glories in literature of an age so rich in the renowns of war. Scott aided Jeffrey at first, but partly vexed by the coxcombry of his review of "Marmion," more by the pro-French tone of his Whig review, the Sheriff deserted the "Blue and Buff," and helped to found the Tory "Quarterly Review," published by Murray, and edited by the learned but crabbed and dilatory Gifford. Both magazines had esteemed contributors: the "Edinburgh" was enlivened by the high spirits and wit of Sydney Smith (1771-1845), qualities not always controlled by good taste when he made merry with Nonconformists—Bishops, of course, were reckoned fair game—and with squires, old familiar butts of every wit. Henry Brougham, later Lord Brougham (1778-1868), was always ready to write the whole magazine, if needful; what Macaulay thought of him, much later, may be read in the letters of the historian. Edinburgh professors and Francis Horner helped. Horner died young; much had been expected of him. The modern reader of the old "Edinburghs" will not find in them much entertainment, except from Sydney Smith's gaiety and Jeffrey's exhibitions of conceited incompetence as a judge of poetry. Both the "Edinburgh" and the "Quarterly," carried political rancour into literary criticism; both dealt in insolent personal bludgeon-work. From such matter the contributions in the "Quarterly" of Southey and Scott were free, and as Scott dealt with topics of permanent literary and historical interest, his essays retain their value: though Canning and other contributors to the "Anti-Jacobin" wrote for the "Quarterly," their buoyant humour of parody and their high spirits did not lighten up its august pages. As the younger poets, Shelley, Byron, and Keats, were either revolutionary or, in Keats's case, supposed to be, at least, Whigs and associates of Whigs, the "Quarterly" was more frequently disgraced by political abuse of poetical works than the "Edinburgh".
"Blackwood's Magazine," after a few months of stagnation, came into the hands of Mr. Blackwood, a bookseller of sound sense and masterful character, who was practically his own editor, though he allowed John Wilson (1785-1854) and John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) to play their pranks. Wilson, of Magdalen College, Oxford, was a splendid athlete, and excelled in country sports; Lockhart, of Balliol, very young in 1817, was of remarkable beauty, with a strongly sarcastic pen ("The Scorpion"), and as sardonic as his far-away cousin in the past, Lockhart of Carnwath, the manager of Jacobite affairs under James VIII. and III., and the author of valuable Memoirs. These two, on a night of claret and mirth, composed "The Chaldee Manuscript," a jape written in Scriptural style on all the notables of Scottish literary society. To persons who understand the allusions, it is still full of very mirthful matter, but many grave sufferers were as little amused as John Knox was by a delightful parody of himself and his associates by young Thomas Maitland, brother of Maitland of Lethington, Secretary of State to Queen Mary. Thenceforth, "Blackwood's," was for several years engaged in broils, which culminated in the death of John Scott, then Editor of "The London Magazine" in which Lamb often wrote. In this serial Scott attacked Lockhart, who went to London to fight him. Scott kept advancing reasons for not meeting Lockhart, who "posted" him and went home. Scott then entangling himself in a dispute with Lockhart's college friend, Christie, put himself in the hands of Horace Smith of "The Rejected Addresses," and of Mr. Patmore. Mr. Patmore's ignorance of the laws of the duello made it necessary for Christie (who had fired once in the air, and thereby legally ended the duel) to shoot in the direction of Scott, who fell mortally wounded. The brawls of "Blackwood's" were detested by Sir Walter Scott, whose daughter Lockhart had married. Wilson, who had no connexion with this tragedy, was an early devotee of Wordsworth's poetry, and himself wrote "The Isle of Palms," "The City of the Plague," and two or three "Kailyard" novels. His memory is best preserved by the high spirits and occasional sentiment and humour of his "Noctes Ambrosianæ," dialogues in which the Ettrick Shepherd is the most conspicuous hero; not always with his own good will or to his own advantage. Wilson was of a most mercurial temperament; his fiery style was apt to be too florid; his caprices of temper were unaccountable; and probably his most permanent work is found in his descriptions of nature and of sport. He was for long Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. Lockhart is seen to most advantage in his immortal "Life of Sir Walter Scott," a noble union of perfect candour with passionate affection for the great man of whom he wrote. His social fastidiousness must always have been vexed by Scott's intimacy with the Ballantyne brothers, who, again, had been incapable of controlling Scott's tendency to large expenditure; indeed, the books of the firm were in a state of chaos. The strictures on these Ballantynes were a blemish in a book which, with Boswell's "Johnson," holds the highest place in English literary biography. It is even more in a few pieces of original verse (such as Carlyle's favourite, "It is an Old Belief") than in the best of his "Spanish Ballads" that Lockhart reveals the poetry within him, and the tenderness of a heart on which he laid the fetter lock of his ancient scutcheon. Of his novels, as we have said, "Adam Blair" is by far the best. He became Editor of the "Quarterly Review" in 1825; his death (1854) took him from a world darkened for him by many bereavements and other sorrows. His body sleeps in Dryburgh Abbey, "at the feet of Sir Walter Scott".
We now turn to the great essayists of the early nineteenth century.
Charles Lamb.
He who would write briefly of Charles Lamb is under this disadvantage: to open a volume of Lamb's essays or letters is to remain absorbed in them, and in wondering affectionate admiration. A man is fascinated by the book, however often read before, and cannot take up the pen.
Born in Crown Office Row, in the Temple (10 February, 1775), Lamb was the son of the clerk of a barrister, Samuel Salt, a Lincolnshire man; his maternal grandmother was housekeeper at the ancient house of Blakesware, in Herts. Lamb has described these people and that place in his essays, "Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," "Blakesmoor in H——shire," and his own infantile mental state (much like that of R. L. Stevenson in some ways), in "Witches and Other Night Fears," while his own and Coleridge's school days are commemorated in "Recollections of Christ's Hospital," and (here he assumes the part of Coleridge), in "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago". To begin the study of Lamb with these essays is in part to understand him, and is wholly to fall in love with him. We see his father, with his honesty, courtesy, and courage; with his "merriest quips and conceits" and many little artistic accomplishments, "a brother of the angle, moreover," devoted to the theatre, an enthusiast for Garrick, and, too early, "in the last sad state of human weakness," babbling of his boyhood. Lamb inherited the "merry quips," and was an inveterate punster. The "conceits" derived from constant reading of Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, and the then neglected early dramatists, abound in his style. The love of the stage he also inherited, and constantly expresses; and, he says, "from my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch stories," and fond of a picture in a great book on the Bible "of the Witch Raising of Samuel, which I wish I had never seen". (The present writer's childhood was dominated by the same picture.) He never laid his head on the pillow, from his fourth to his eighth year, "without an assurance which realized its own prophecy" of seeing some frightful spectres. He supposed that these imaginations might date from "our ante-mundane condition". They were, in fact, proofs of his imaginative genius in infancy, for any child may have the fears, yet never fancy that it sees the phantasms. Conceivably the strain of madness in Lamb's blood, the madness which made his sister Mary slay her own mother, and affected her at frequent intervals, was also for something in his childish terrors. In later life his dreams wandered in great cities never visited by him, which he saw "with a map-like distinctness of trace, a daylight vividness of vision". He thought that "the degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking". His verses, like "When maidens such as Hester die," though exquisite, give less proof of his poetical faculty than his essay on "Dream Children," and on his lost love, which is perhaps the most beautiful example of his peculiar pathos.
Thus, throughout his essays, Lamb is constantly studying and revealing himself, his sister, his friends, with varying disguises and alterations of circumstance. In his "Character of the Late Elia," (his pseudonym) he is his own critic. "Better it is that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him." Unnatural it would have been to him, even in the briefest note to a friend, to write in a plain forthright style, but his quaintnesses and his conceits are never obscure. Elia "gave himself too little concern about what he uttered and in whose presence". That this is too true appears in the famous scene where he desired "to feel the bumps" of a very stupid comptroller of stamps, and was not to be restrained by Wordsworth's mild "My dear Charles!" What pranks, with his confessed "imperfect sympathy" with Scots, he may have played before the avenging Carlyle, no man knows. His friends "were, for the most part, persons of uncertain fortune ... a ragged regiment". "He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people." "The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood." Passing all his best hours at a desk in the India Office, he returned to his gambols when free. His essays were part of his playtime; in them he was his real self.
From 1782 to 1789 he was at Christ's Hospital, but did not attain to the high rank of Grecian, nor enter either of the Universities which he loved. He continued to meet Coleridge during vacations at "The Salutation and Cat," and contributed verses to Coleridge's volume of 1796 (Cottle, Bristol). In 1796 befell the tragedy in his family, and henceforth the care of his sister Mary (the Bridget of Elia) dominated his existence of unrepining self-sacrifice. In literature (in addition to the old writers), he admired Burns, and Wordsworth, from the first. It is more curious that Burger's ballad of Lenore (the Death-ride) struck Lamb as potently as it inspired Scott, who appreciated Lamb much more than he was by Lamb appreciated, and in vain invited this resolute Cockney to visit Abbotsford. In 1797 he contributed more sonnets to a volume by Coleridge and Lloyd, and in 1798 published his tale "Rosamund Gray",
Friends going up to examine it
Observe a good deal of Charles Lamb in it
(to parody Browning), it has passages of his style, quotations from his favourite old authors; one chapter is an essay in his own manner, and there is even an anticipation of "Dream Children". Shelley praised the story highly, but Lamb was not enthusiastic about Shelley's poems or Byron's. His "John Woodvil" was intended for the stage, and the tragedy was published in 1802. It contains fine passages of verse, and a great deal of the "local colour" of the Restoration; perhaps the chief merit lies in the restoration of the accents of old poetry. The farce of "Mr. H." was a foredoomed failure. There is room for variety of opinion as to the suitability of the "Tales from Shakespeare" (much of which was executed by Mary Lamb), for children; but the peculiar merits of the style are beyond dispute. The same remark may be made on "The Adventures of Ulysses". On the other hand the notes to the "Specimens of English Dramatic Poets" (1808) reveal Lamb at his best as a critic and a master of language, while the selections are invaluable to readers who have not the time nor the taste for the perusal of the entire works of many most unequal dramatists. The book was a revelation to all but a few readers who, like Scott, had dwelt much with Marlowe, Chapman, Ford, Webster, and the rest.
Lamb "found himself" and found a public, at first small but ever increasing, when he wrote his first essays for "The London Magazine" in 1820, under the name of Elia. (Republished as "Essays of Elia" in 1823.) The very names of the essays are fragrant in the memory, and the characters drawn have become household words, while the personal touches are, with Lamb's delightful and fantastic letters, his best biography. In 1825, Lamb retired, with a liberal pension, from the India Office, and was "a freed man after thirty-three years' slavery" (see his essay "The Superannuated Man"). Lamb's "Last Essays" were published in 1833, and the author did not long survive the death of his life-long friend, Coleridge, in July, 1834; he passed away on 27 December, 1834. His name stands with those of Addison and Steele among English essayists: indeed he is much more read than they, as he was nearer to our own time, while more closely connected than they with the best literature of the great centuries which preceded the eighteenth. His self-revelations too are more serious than those of his famous predecessors, and the character revealed is more potently attractive.
Leigh Hunt.
Born nine years after Lamb (in 1784) and, like Lamb and Coleridge, educated at Christ's Hospital, Leigh Hunt perhaps holds, after Lamb and Hazlitt, the third place among the English essayists of his age. While love of literature, of wide and very miscellaneous reading in old English and Italian poetry was the chief pleasure of Hunt, he also took, with great vigour, a side in the politics of his age. A "Friend of the People," a contemner of kings, and no sympathizer with his country in the Napoleonic wars, Hunt, with his brother John, started, in 1808, "The Examiner," a Radical weekly journal of politics and literature. In 1812 he published what the law called a libel on the Prince Regent, and for two years occupied prison rooms which he decorated in his own taste (leaning to roses on the wall-paper, and plaster casts), among these he received his friends. Though he had a rapid perception of new poetic excellence, though he was the first to perceive and welcome the star of Keats, and, almost alone, encouraged and applauded Shelley, Hunt was blind to the merits of poets who were not of his own political party. In the text and notes of his "Feast of the Poets" (1814), first published in "The Reflector," he insulted Scott, Coleridge, and Wordsworth,—and made "for" rhyme to "straw". When his "Story of Rimini" appeared (1816), it told Dante's tale of Paolo and Francesca with a Cockney jauntiness, and abounded in such epithets as "perky," "bosomy," "farmy," "winy Hunt's theory was that "the harmonious freedom of our old poets"—"their freedom in continuing the sense of the heroic rhyming couplets," should be "united with the vigour of Dryden". His verse was based on Chaucer's, and on some examples of the seventeenth century, and his metrical example influenced Shelley, while Keats followed him in re-telling Italian stories, and, at first, even in his affectations.
"Rimini" and its author were furiously attacked, for reasons of politics, by the young Tory writers in "Blackwood's Magazine," to whom Hunt's ineradicable vanity and lack of taste lent handles. He was dubbed "King of the Cockneys," and Keats himself shrank from his ways and manners. He joined Byron and Shelley in Italy in 1822; they were to work together on a journal, "The Liberal," but, from the first, and especially after the death of Shelley, the relations of Byron with the needy and familiar Hunt were intolerably unpleasant. In 1828, after Byron's death, Hunt avenged himself in his "Lord Byron and His Contemporaries," a book which, as he came to see, should never have been written.
The rest of Hunt's life was spent in journalism, mainly literary; his essays, often delightful reading, were republished in "Men, Women, and Books," "Imagination and Fancy," "A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla," while in his last work, "Autobiography," he forgives all his enemies, among whom he had actually reckoned Sir Walter Scott. He was the friend of Dickens and Carlyle. He wrote concerning Carlyle's style: "How could he exculpate this style, in which he denounces so many 'shams,' of being itself a sham? of being affected, unnecessary, and ostentatious? a jargon got up to confound pretension with performance, and reproduce endless German talk under the guise of novelty?" Here was candour: Leigh Hunt cultivated the virtue described as "the independence of the heart".
William Hazlitt.
Lamb as a man was universally beloved, except by Carlyle, and as a writer he is the friend of the human race. On the other side, Lamb's friend and fellow-essayist, William Hazlitt, in a letter to Leigh Hunt, says, "I want to know why everybody has such a dislike to me". There is much pathos and a plentiful lack of humour in the question. The brief answer is that Hazlitt acted as if he were trying to make himself disliked. In this he was pretty successful; he quarrelled even with Lamb, but never shook Lamb's constant affection. There is so much of Hazlitt's self in his works that, greatly as his good qualities delight us, there are times when we can scarcely forgive his defects, and are apt to conceive a personal grudge against him.
Born at Maidstone on 10 April, 1778, Hazlitt was the son of a distinguished Nonconformist minister. After visiting America, which was not tolerant of his doctrines, the elder Hazlitt returned, to England, where the son resided from 1788 to 1802. In 1798 he met Coleridge preaching in a blue coat and white waistcoat. The great and peculiar merit of Hazlitt's essays is his power of expressing and communicating the zest of his enjoyment of nature, human nature, preaching, juggling performances, prize-fighting, painting, fiction, sculpture, and the game of fives. In his description of the voice, the manner, the personal magic of Coleridge, then in his glorious youth, Hazlitt outshines himself, as he does in his criticism of Cavanagh's style in the fives-court. Hazlitt visited Coleridge at Stowey, and heard Wordsworth read his "Peter Bell"; heard Coleridge speak with contempt of Gray, and with intolerance of Pope, and express a dislike of Dr. Johnson!
These were divine days; but politics crossed the friendships of Hazlitt. The others had been enthusiasts, like himself, for the French Revolution, but not for Napoleon, as objecting to be emancipated by a hero who subdued hereditary kings, and supplied to conquered nations his own brothers and captains to be their princes. Hazlitt, on the other hand, rejoiced in the superb genius of Napoleon as he did in that of Shakespeare and in the sunlight. Bonaparte he could no more keep out of his essays on Poetry than Mr. Dick could banish "that comely head" of Charles I. from his memorial. To Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other friends became anathema, as renegades; and it is when we read his odious attack on Coleridge's poetry, in "The Edinburgh Review," that we understand "why everybody has such a dislike of me".
People who have read his "Liber Amoris," still more they who have studied the original letters partly published in that book, perceive other ways in which Hazlitt became antipathetic to human nature. He was, in the Scots phrase, "thrawn," and as he could seldom avoid exhibiting his temper in his writings, he may be and is admired for his generous qualities, and power of interpreting poetry and art, of elevating and enlivening the appreciative powers of his readers; but he can never be liked without reserve. His course of life, after he abandoned the study of metaphysics and the art of painting for the lecture-room and the pen of the ready essayist, put him too much in the way of temptation. He was too free to bring his personal and political animosities into his work, "it is such easy writing". He was also unskilled in the management of his life, and both his marriages (not to mention the unsuccessful passion of his "Liber Amoris") were fountains of bitterness. Living in London (1812-1820), Hazlitt gave his lectures on "English Poetry," and "Comic Writers" (1818-1819). Of 1817 are his "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays," and his "Round Table," essays on all sorts of subjects reprinted from Leigh Hunt's paper "The Examiner". In the work on poetry it is surprising to find him ranking Ossian with Homer, the Bible, and Dante, but when he gives his reasons it is natural to envy his powers of appreciation and enjoyment. To read him on Chaucer and Spenser is to desire to read Spenser and Chaucer themselves, so nobly does he recommend them, and Shakespeare, and so on, till, over Burns, he falls into a quarrel with Wordsworth, and then lashes "The Lake School," sniffs at Scott, and discovers but "one fine passage" in "Christabel". His politics prevent him from appreciating what is excellent in the Cavalier poets, and even when writing of Milton, Satan suggests to him Bonaparte, and he goes off full-mouthed on that trail. Among the novelists he is as much at home, and as convincingly right in his criticisms, especially of Richardson, as he is lost in a mist when he touches on Racine and Molière. Over Scott's novels he first breaks into a passion of admiration, and then, remembering politics, pelts the author (who never gave a thought to him) in the manner of Gulliver's Yahoos.
Hazlitt, unhappily, lived at a time when both parties in the State carried, with inconceivable rancour and stupidity, their politics into the field of literary criticism. His "Characters of Shakespeare" was slandered by Gifford in "The Quarterly Review," and he keeps telling us the sale of the book was stopped. Why members of his own party did not continue to buy it, he does not ask. In "Blackwood's Magazine" (1817-1818) he was styled "pimply-faced Hazlitt," a leader of "the Cockney School," and he says that Keats died of being called a Cockney. In fact, these stupidities did not affect Keats more than any other man of sense, while Hazlitt never ceased to avenge on people perfectly innocent, and on the guilty Gifford, the insults which he ought to have disregarded. For these reasons, and because he wrote so much, his essays are unequal, though when he is at his best, and he is often at his best, he is in the foremost rank of critics. He died in 1830. "Well, I have had a happy life," was among his latest words, and his finest works are reflections of his happiest hours.
Thomas de Quincey.
An essayist whose works are probably more read than those of Leigh Hunt is Thomas de Quincey, one of the extraordinary men whose boyhood was in the eighteenth, and whose works were produced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Born in Manchester in 1785, and dying in Edinburgh in 1859, De Quincey was precisely the contemporary of Hunt. His father, dying young, left his children adequately provided for, and, to judge by De Quincey's Autobiography, they were extraordinary children. William, the invincibly amusing, died young, and De Quincey's first great sorrow was the death of Elizabeth, when he himself was 6 and she was not 10 years of age. His description of the vision and the mysterious music which attended his visit to her as she lay dead, is one of the most remarkable and characteristic passages in his writings. Sixty-nine years later, "his very last act was to throw up his arms and utter, as if with a cry of surprised recognition, 'Sister! Sister! Sister!'" He was, indeed, a born seer; and probably other persons, if so ill-advised as to follow his example in taking quantities of laudanum, would not behold the visions which first charmed and then tormented "The English Opium Eater".
De Quincey was a wanderer and a fugitive from his school days, at least such he became after receiving an accidental stroke on the head from a cane, which prostrated him for weeks, and quite conceivably was one cause of his eccentricities. As he has told us he ran away, quite needlessly, from school at 16 or 17, tramped, a sentimental traveller, in North Wales, starved, lurked, and walked the midnight streets of London with Ann, ran away from Oxford (Worcester College) when his papers had astonished and delighted the examiners, and, generally, flew in the face of common sense. He came into his little fortune, behaved to Coleridge with the generosity of Shelley, settled long near Wordsworth at Grasmere, made the acquaintance of John Wilson (Christopher North), married a country girl, and fell into the miseries of the opium eater. Poverty ensued, De Quincey returned to his fugitive life of lurking in London, and, in 1821, astonished the world of readers by "The Confessions of an English Opium Eater," published in "The London Magazine," for which Lamb and Hazlitt used to write. De Quincey was acquainted with Lamb, and Wordsworth and Coleridge he knew well. But he belonged to none of the rival sets of writers, "Cockneys" or Edinburgh wits; and, in his freakish moods of schoolboy-like high spirits, he wrote personal banter of his best friends, deriding Coleridge's corpulence and "large expanse of cheek"; the retort, as to cheek, was obvious. In 1830 De Quincey moved to Edinburgh; and in lodgings there, and at a cottage near Lasswade on the Esk, he mainly passed the rest of his strange, industrious, eccentric life. He wrote alternately for Blackwood's and Tait's magazines: almost the whole matter of his sixteen volumes appeared originally in magazines, and was written with the wolf and the printer's boy at the door. His vast store of reading, accumulated before 1821, embraced the old English writers and the new German philosophers, magic, political economy, and the records of police trials.
That sketch for a murder with a pair of dumb-bells, by the murderer Thurtell, "the same who was generally censured for murdering the late Mr. Weare," occurs, not only in the essay on "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," but in the long essay on "Style". The story of the very mysterious murder, at noon-day, of Mrs. Ruscombe in Bristol, is very well told in "Autobiographic Sketches" ("The Priory"). Confessedly some essays, such as "Dream-fugue" in "The English Mail Coach," are records of visions inspired by opium: "the Dream knows best; and the Dream, I say again, is the responsible party". These essays on the Mail Coach, then the marvel of rapidity of travel, offer, in miniature, the type of De Quincey's style, with its sonorous poetic cadences, its quaint colloquial familiarities,—with his insatiable intellectual curiosity, and his digressiveness—he discusses the origin of the word "snob". Finally the Dream has its way, after the wonderful description of the laurelled coach bearing news of Wellington's and Blücher's victory to England, and to two lovers the sudden face of death.
De Quincey, with his wide reading, with the songless poet in his nature, and with his strange freakish habits, his following a chance association of ideas far beyond the field of his essay, is, naturally, one of the most unequal of writers. His prose is, on occasion, "aureate" or ornate, in a manner which has, perhaps, had its day; and again he deals in schoolboy slang. Only parts of his famous essay on Jeanne d'Arc are excellent: taste has moved away from, and may return to, the mystic eloquence of "The Three Ladies of Sorrow". But in De Quincey there is variety enough for all tastes, and he is perhaps especially inspiring and delightful to young readers. He died at Edinburgh on 8 December, 1859.
We now turn to the poets of the nineteenth century, after Wordsworth, though the first on the list was his senior in years. He is less important for his work than as the pioneer of the poets who, in the United States, contributed to the poetic literature of the English language.
Philip Freneau.
Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was the first American poet of any note. America, colonial or independent, has scarcely any early literary history, which may be mainly accounted for by the preoccupation of men's minds in taming the waste, in dispossessing the warlike natives, in establishing the Puritan theocracy in New England, and in war, whether colonial, against France and her Indian allies, or against the Old Country. Yet we might have expected lyrics, at least, from the non-Puritan settlers of the very literary age of Elizabeth and James I. and from Cavalier exiles of the period of Charles I. They must have been in love; but that poetic passion, among the colonists, was singularly tuneless. We might have looked for volumes on the new country in addition to the learned volume of William Strachey (who compares the religion, rites, and legends of the Red Tribes with those of Greece and Rome) and the larger and more romantic tome of Captain John Smith. The Anglo-Saxon colonists of this Isle of Britain lived even more hardly than the colonists in America; yet we have seen that, even in its scanty fragments, their poetry has distinction, sentiment, and pathos. But American poetry did not begin at the beginning in poems of personal sentiment and experience and in heroic lays. Religion, theological controversy, colonial history, and witchcraft fully occupied the flowing pen of Cotton Mather (1663-1728). The theocracy, like that of Calvin, Knox, and Andrew Melville, which he supported, was broken by the turn of public opinion in 1692, against the hangings of witches on "spectral evidence" (subjective apparitions of the witches to their victims). On the witches, on religion, on colonial history with a controversial purpose ("Magnalia"), and on many other themes, Cotton Mather wrote at enormous length. He was a Bostonian, a Harvard man, and learned; in fact, he was the counterpart of his correspondent, Wodrow, the author of the "History of the Sufferings of the Kirk under the Restoration". His style is Jacobean rather than late Caroline, and the curious will find him "full of matter".
Religion inspired Jonathan Edwards; politics, science, and homely Hesiodic advice occupied Benjamin Franklin, but, as for poetry in America, it begins with Freneau, who was born eight years before Prince Charles's last hope of recovering England failed, and who died in the death year of Sir Walter Scott (1832). Freneau was a sailor, a journalist, a writer of patriotic verse during the War of Independence, and his best known poem is "The Indian Cemetery," which displays the same regret for a vanished people as the Anglo-Saxon "The Ruined City".
Thomas Campbell stole, consciously or unconsciously, a line from this piece. Here is Campbell, in "O'Connor's Child"—
Now on the grass-green turf he sits,
His tasselled horn beside him laid;
Now o'er the hills in chase he flits,
The hunter and the deer—a shade.
Freneau has—
By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews,
In habit for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer—a shade.
This plagiarism, by a Scot who ought to have known better, must be taken as a real case of extremely petty larceny. Any mortal who cared for grammar would have written, not "The hunter and the deer—a shade"—for arithmetically there were two shades—but
The hunter like the deer, a shade.
Campbell, if not Freneau, must have known that the passage coincides with the scene in Homer ("Odyssey," Book XI.) where the shade of Heracles pursues the shades of the animals which on earth he had slain. The cadences of Freneau are those of Mickle in "Cumnor Hall".
The dews of summer night did fall,
The Moon, sweet Regent of the sky,
Silver'd the walls of Cumnor Hall
And many an oak that grew thereby.
As a rule, Freneau's "Muse," like that of Mr. Lothian Dodd when slightly exhilarated, "was the patriotic," inspiriting to the contemporary warrior, but not of imperishable literary value. As senior in years to Tennyson and Browning, Freneau's compatriots, Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow, may here follow him in chronological order.
William Cullen Bryant.
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was one of those concerning whom Sainte-Beuve says that they carry about in them a poet who died young. His tendency was to write Hymns to Proserpine; among the works which fascinated his boyhood were Blair's "Grave," Bishop Porteous on "Death" (the ghost of Mrs. Veal (1705), a qualified critic, preferred Drelincourt), and the hectic verses of Kirke White. Later came Wordsworth, perhaps too late; for Bryant's "Thanatopsis," written when he was 17, descends from such later works as follow the author of the Anglo-Saxon poem of "The Grave". Not much later came "The Water Fowl," a favourite of the compilers of anthologies. "Thanatopsis" was frequently retouched, and now closes with a passage of the highest ethical dignity, though to be sure there is little of hope in the idea that
each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of Death.
He was successful as a journalist,
the friend of Freedom's cause
As far away as Paris is,
and also at home, where the negro was concerned. He did not cease when an editor to write poetry, and he translated Homer into blank verse. In reading Bryant's poems we cannot but see that he offered the best wine first, in pieces like "To a Water Fowl" and "The Yellow Violet". The former is full of charm in atmosphere and cadence, though the concluding moral, as in "The Yellow Violet," is inspired by Wordsworth. His best pieces of landscape, pictures of autumn and winter, are somewhat reminiscent of Cooper. "The Ages," a summary of the world's history in the stanza of Spenser, is more remarkable for the happy patriotism of its conclusion than for originality of thought. It is really amusing to see his inability to escape from the charms of the tomb,—tombs of Red Indians, or of conquerors or of kings, "in dusty darkness hid," all are welcome to him; and in "The Child's Funeral" the reader is happily surprised by the discovery that the infant, prematurely placed in the vault, is alive and enjoying himself.
John Greenleaf Whittier.
Whittier (1807-1892) was born of a rural Quaker family in Massachusetts. He was mainly self-taught; he early commenced journalist, on the side of the party opposed to slavery; and he retained no high esteem for his early flights in verse. He wrote much in the journal, "The New Era," which was fortunate enough to publish Mrs. Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and during the great war he was one of the bards who stimulated the valour of the North; much as another Quaker, by waving his hat, encouraged the Duke of Cumberland's dragoons at Prince Charles's rearguard action at Clifton. But there the side befriended by the English Quaker was not victorious. In "Snow-Bound" (1866) (the name-giving piece is a delightful picture of a happy winter's night in such a cottage as that of Whittier's boyhood) Whittier first met a popular success as a poet, though already some of his poems (probably pirated) were not unpopular in England. He was a good, earnest and amiable man, and, as a poet, copious and wholesome, rather than of curious and exquisite distinction. Many of his verses are religious, moral or political, and, despite his love of nature, his lines are not always, where nature is concerned, on a level with the best of Bryant. His stories in ballad or balladish form were naturally popular; "Maud Muller" is perhaps the best known in England; he had a variety of themes, colonial, Red Indian, and generally historical. He even went to the "Rig-Veda"; and catholicity of taste is shown when an American Quaker sings of Soma, the rather mysterious nectar of Indra and other deities of the Indian Olympus. That his poems of war should be energetic, while he was professedly a man of peace, is not so remote from the practice of the earlier Friends as we are apt to suppose.[1]
His life,—his rustic and laborious youth, his irregular education, his absorption in the politics of his own country, his enthusiasm for Freedom's cause,—has a resemblance to the life of Burns, and makes him distinctly a national poet. But it is needless to enumerate the points in Bums which are missing in Whittier!
Perhaps an alien may venture to utter an idea which was in his mind before he found that it had been expressed by a fellow-countryman of the poet. Professor Barrett Wendell writes, concerning some of Whittier's pieces, "they belong to that school of verse which perennially flourishes and withers in the poetical columns of country newspapers". The verse of the country newspaper was the wild-stock of Whittier's rose; the wild-stock of Burns was the folk-song of Scotland. Whittier had to educate himself, and his genius often lifted him far above the artless verse of his youth. He was not wholly unimitative. In his famous appeal, "Massachusetts to Virginia," we read—
And sandy Barnstaple rose up, wet with the salt sea spray;
And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narraganset Bay,
Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill,
And the cheers of Hampshire's woodmen swept down from Holyoke hill,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And the red glare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of Carlisle!
It is Macaulay's "Armada"!
There is a mountain peak in America which bears the name of the renowned statesman, Daniel Webster. Whittier, in days before the war, had written against Daniel Webster, more in sorrow than in anger, the poem called "Ichabod".
So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!
The glory from his grey hairs gone
For ever more.
Much later, in a kind of palinode, he, addressing the shade of Webster, gave a good example of the vigour of his octosyllabics!
But, where the native mountains bare
Their foreheads to diviner air,
Fit emblem of enduring fame,
One lofty summit keeps thy name.
For thee, the cosmic forces did
The rearing of that pyramid,
The prescient ages shaping with
Fire, flood, and frost thy monolith.
The rigorous critic may say that the idea is derived from Byron; and object to
forces did
The rearing of that pyramid,
as a somewhat colloquial idiom, but the lines have very great speed and vigour.
If we insist that a very young literature must produce for inspection her national poet (and Mr. Lowell says that foreign critics made this demand very early indeed) the poet cannot be Poe, and Whitman is hardly eligible. Whittier seems, so far, to be the best candidate for the bays.
Many admirers of Burns will be eager to confess that Whittier's "Snow-bound" has merits superior to those of the Ayrshire ploughman's companion-piece, "The Cottar's Saturday Night".
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Longfellow, by far the most popular, in his own country and in England, of American poets, was born at Portland, Maine, in 1807; he was two years older than Tennyson. He was a contemporary at Bowdoin College of his country's greatest novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1826 he began three "travel-years" which prepared him for the Chair of French and Spanish literature, first held by George Ticknor in 1817; he first taught at Bowdoin, and in 1836 succeeded Ticknor at Harvard. American literature now began to be affected by the poets of the European continent, which had, ever since Chaucer, and especially in the Elizabethan age, fostered the poetry of England. Only the morally pure and elevating elements in continental literature affected Longfellow; and this was not precisely the case where Chaucer and the Elizabethans were concerned. Indeed, the greater literature of the United States is not mastered by the Passions; Byron, Shelley, and Burns were never its idols, and Hawthorne did a daring thing when he wrote "The Scarlet Letter". Longfellow, whom Poe absurdly accuses of plagiarism, was no imitator. He had a note, simple indeed, but his own. As far as any traces in his work of Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, are apparent, we might suppose that he had never read them. This kind of originality is not always found even in considerable poets. The measure of Scott's "Lay" is borrowed from "Christabel"; Burns usually had a model which he transfigured; Byron's Oriental tales in verse are bad copies from Scott in versification;—but the minor poet is always imitative.
Longfellow, like the enemy of Bonaparte mentioned by Heine, was "still a professor" till 1854, when he was succeeded by Mr. Lowell. While occupying an academic Chair he published perhaps his best-known work, "The Voices of the Night" (1839), his "Evangeline" (pathos in English hexameters) in 1847, and "The Golden Legend" in 1851. In his first book Longfellow "made a bull's-eye" in hitting the public taste. The bull's-eye rang to the anvil strokes of "The Village Blacksmith". Young men shouted "Excelsior" as they walked the streets, like the two Writers to the Signet who met each other shouting lines from Flodden in "Marmion" on the North Bridge of Edinburgh. It is true that
To the Lords of Convention 'twas Claverhouse spoke,
or
The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood,
or
The laurel, the palms, and the pæan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake,
are perhaps even more provocative than "Excelsior" to him who shouts "for his personal diversion". But it is much to write verses which provoke this kind of enthusiasm among persons not apt to be stirred by literature. On mature reflection, the maiden in "Excelsior" was rather "in a coming on disposition,"
He answered as he turned away,
"What would the Junior Proctor say?"
is a pardonable academic parody. If you analyse the similes in "The Psalm of Life," you meet some shipwrecked brother who, though he has piled up his bark on some reef, is still sailing o'er Time's dreary main, and taking comfort in observing, through his glass, that somebody has left footprints on the sands. Enfin, these poems have "that!" as Reynolds said, though the metaphors are mixed as if by the master-hand of Sir Boyle Roche. These things are not Longfellow's masterpieces, and they, with the apocryphal viking's "Skeleton in Armour," are best read in happy and uncritical boyhood. At any age we may appreciate such lines as—
The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair,
The best beloved Night,
and
I remember the black wharves and the slips,
And the sea-tide, tossing free,
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and the mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.
Simplicity is dominant in Longfellow's verse; and he has "a message" on which he is perhaps too fond of dwelling. In one of his anti-slavery poems the hero, like Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, is a king in his own country, though the slave trade in "black ivory" direct from Africa was no longer extant. In "Hiawatha" he reproduced the measure of the Finnish "Kalewala" with much of the woodland perfume of the original poem. To boys fresh from Cooper's novels the tale is a delight if it has palled on more sophisticated tastes. Theocritus hoped that his verses "would be on men's lips, above all on the lips of the young". If this were Longfellow's ambition he had his reward in full. He wrote for a young people, in the boyhood of its own literature, and opened for it the magical volume of old romance, and his hold on those who read him in youth can never be shaken, being strengthened by all happy and tender memories. His muse
Sits and gazes at us,
With those deep and tender eyes.
Like the stars, so still and saint-like.
Looking downwards from the skies.
Alfred Tennyson.
Born in 1809, the son of the Rev. George Tennyson, Rector of the parish at Somersby in the Lincolnshire Wolds, Alfred Tennyson was a schoolboy when Keats and Byron died. At the age of 8, he says, "I remember making a line I thought grander than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott..." it was this—
With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood.
The context is absent, but the line is sonorous, and utterly unlike anything that the child could find in the poems with which he was already acquainted, those of Thomson, Scott, Byron, and Campbell. Even if he had read Milton, the line gave promise of his originality as an "inventor of harmonies" in blank verse. After imitating Pope, and, on a large scale (6000 verses), copying Scott, Tennyson wrote, at 14, a drama in blank verse. Of this a chorus survives in Tennyson's volume of 1830, and in such lines as these about the mountains riven
By secret fire and midnight storms
That wander round their windy cones,
we already find his manner, his use of a favourite epithet, and his interest in the forces that
Draw down the æonian hills and sow
The dust of continents to be.
At 17 (1826), after being "dominated by Byron," he "put him away altogether," and this was the tendency of his generation at Cambridge, of Thackeray, Monckton Milnes, and others. In 1827 "Poems by Two Brothers," Alfred and his brother Frederick (Charles, too, contributed) were published, but contained none of the verses stamped with his own unmistakable mark which he had already composed. Among these the ballad on a wooing like that of the Bride of Lammermoor is specially original. At 19 (1828) Tennyson wrote "The Lover's Tale" in blank verse,—he had not yet read Shelley, but the Italian scenery, and the rich imagery, are somewhat in Shelley's manner. The book was published fifty years later (1879); only the two first parts were written in youth. Tennyson went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1828, where he met Thackeray, FitzGerald, Milnes (Lord Houghton), and Arthur Hallam, son of the historian, and the foremost of his friends. He contributed to the essays of this set,—"The Apostles," a paper on "Ghosts," and won the prize poem on "Timbuctoo" by an obscure production in blank verse. Concerning the cause of its success there is an amusing if apocryphal anecdote.
In 1830, when Bulwer Lytton was declaring that novels had killed the taste for poetry, Tennyson's first volume appeared. The obvious fault was the affected diction; babblings as of Leigh Hunt; but in "Mariana in the Moated Grange," Tennyson declared his real self; as in "The Ode to Memory," "The Dying Swan," "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," and "Oriana". Here we discern Tennyson's mastery of original cadences; his close observation of Nature; his opulent language, and his visions of romance. "The Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind" displays the doubts that recur in "In Memoriam"; and "The Mystic" reveals a very potent element in his character, that of the visionary with elusive experiences of "dissociation" approaching to "trance". In a beautiful passage of "In Memoriam," these experiences are again cast, as far as possible, "in matter moulded forms of speech". Before 1830 Tennyson had anticipated, in an essay, the modern doctrine of the evolution of man from the lowest rudimentary forms of life, and had also personal psychological experiences like those of Plotinus and other late Platonic philosophers.
In 1832 almost all of the poems of the new volume of 1833 had been composed. This book included the first shape, magical but more or less humorous, and confused in form, of "The Lady of Shalott"; with the first form of "Œnone" (written in the Pyrenees during a tour with Hallam), "The Miller's Daughter," which needed and received much correction, as did "The Palace of Art". Here, too, first appeared the passion of "Fatima," the perfect "Mariana in the South," and "The Lotus Eaters," which has, in brief space, all the languor and all the charm of Spenser; it is a poem never excelled by Tennyson. A very amusing review, by Lockhart in "The Quarterly," mocked at all the many faults, but never alluded to the more numerous and essential beauties of the book. Ten years later Lockhart repented, and handed Tennyson's two volumes of 1842 to his friend Sterling, for criticism which could not be mocking. The poet, though naturally sensitive to criticism, had bowed to censures which, as he saw, were deserved, and had substituted noble lines for the earlier inequalities and eccentricities.
The sudden death at Vienna, of Arthur Hallam, in September, 1833, was a shock and a sorrow which left an indelible mark on the poet's character and genius. He composed, not much later, "The Two Voices," and the resolute and noble "Ulysses"; with "Sir Galahad," that absolute romantic lyric; "Tithonus," perhaps the most perfect of all his poems on classical mythology; "The Morte d'Arthur," the greatest of his idylls on the cycle of Arthur; and he wrote many parts of "In Memoriam". He had chosen Poverty for his mate, with poetry, like Wordsworth.
In 1842 appeared the two volumes which contain the flower and fruit of Tennyson's youth. Much that was new, with more that was re-formed from early immature phases, was offered; and such excellence in so many various styles, including the rural idylls—the light and charming "Day Dream" (The Sleeping Beauty), "The Talking Oak," and again "The Dream of Fair Women," the strange romantic "Vision of Sin"; the classical and Arthurian poems—to mention no others,—was never exhibited by a young English poet. There was little to regret or discard, and even "The May Queen" had this merit or demerit that it at once became extremely popular. Here was a fortunate "alacrity in sinking"! In the opinion of "Old Fitz" (Fitz Gerald), Tennyson never regained the level of these two thin volumes of 1842: perhaps we may say that he never rose above that level.
"The Princess" (1847) contains several of his most perfect lyrics, and all the charm of his blank verse, but it is professedly a fantasy; the poet "is not always wholly serious," he writes somewhat in the vein of "Love's Labour's Lost". In 1850 appeared, anonymously, "In Memoriam," the record of three years of pain, and of strivings with the Giant of Bunyan's Doubting Castle. We cannot discuss the reasonings, the waverings, the reviewings of the then most recent theories of evolution, with their presumed theological consequences; but the lover of poetry who cannot find it in "In Memoriam" may perhaps be regarded as not destitute of prejudices. Tennyson would be more universally appreciated as a great and delightful poet if he had never expressed any of his personal opinions about politics, society, morals, or religion in verse. His two volumes of 1842 contain nothing, or very little, that can annoy the most sensitive up-to-date spirit.
In 1850, Tennyson, by that time married, succeeded Wordsworth in the Laureateship. The first fruits of his office was the magnificent "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1852). In 1855 appeared "Maud," which is prejudiced by the "topical" allusions to the Crimean War, and by the appearance, as hero and narrator, of a modern Master of Ravenswood, who is, according to the poet himself "a morbid poetic soul... an egotist with the makings of a cynic". The love-poetry is beautiful; and most beautiful are the exquisite lines "O that 'twere possible". But the day for a kind of tale or novel of modern life, in verse, had passed before the death of Crabbe.
In 1859 appeared the first four "Idylls of the King," "Enid," from a mediaeval tale in the Welsh "Mabinogion"; "Elaine," and "Guinevere," from the "Morte d'Arthur," and "Vivien," they beguiler of the wise Merlin, from the same source. All are rich in beauties of style, in visions of Nature, in such characters as Elaine and Lancelot, and in delicate observation; except "Vivien" all the Idylls were eagerly welcomed; though some critics held that Arthur preached too much to his fallen Queen.
Thackeray wrote to his "dear old Alfred" that the Idylls had given him "a splendour of happiness.... Gold and purple and diamonds, I say, gentlemen, and glory and love and honour, and if you haven't given me all these why should I be in such an ardour of gratitude? But I have had out of that dear book the greatest delight that has come to me since I was a young man." Old men who were schoolboys when Thackeray wrote thus, felt, and feel, what Thackeray expresses. The Idylls were continued later, to the number of twelve;—not all are of equal merit; none perhaps is so good as the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842, but the whole are the poetic rival, in romantic charm, in haunting evasive allegory, and in ethics, of Malory's great old book. In the Idylls, as in Malory, we find, as Caxton had written four hundred years earlier, "the gentle and virtuous deeds that some knights used in these days, noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, love, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin." The tragedy of Lancelot and Guinevere, the mystic interlude of the Quest for the Grail, the ruin of that world, and the passing of Arthur, were all given by old romance, and are all beautified by charm of diction, and countless pictures of Nature, and similes worthy of Homer, such as
So dark a forethought rolled about his brain,
As on a dull day in an Ocean cave
The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall
In silence.
In "Enoch Arden" (1864) Tennyson again displayed his matchless variety of command over all classes of poetic themes, and added to "In Memoriam" a lyric full of the tranquil tenderness of an immortal love, "In the Valley of Cauteretz". Once more choosing a novel and difficult and sublime topic, he gave us "Lucretius," a study of the magnificent ruin of a supreme heart and soul and intellect.
Of the seven plays published between 1875 and 1892 there is not space to speak; but by common admission the genius of Tennyson was not fitted for the drama of the stage. In 1880 the poet, unconquerable by Time, gave, in "Ballads and Other Poems," the nobly passionate dramatic monologue of "Rizpah"; and his most thrilling war-song, "The Revenge". With 1885 came the Virgilian cadences of the lines to Virgil, written for the poet's townsmen, the Mantuans, on that
Golden branch amid the shadows,
Kings and realms that pass to rise no more.
Tennyson's genius was, indeed, akin to that of Virgil in tenderness, in "the sense of tears in mortal things," in elaborate and exquisite art, and in the selecting and polishing and re-setting of jewels from the poetry of ancient Greece. We saw, in the opening of this volume, how from age to age Homer's descriptions of the Elysian land, and of the home of the gods, reached an Anglo-Saxon minstrel; and now Tennyson recasts the thoughts in his picture of "the island valley of Avilion," the Celtic paradise.
At the age of 81, like Sophocles unsubdued by time, and still absolute master of his art, he composed one of his supreme lyrics, "Crossing the Bar": we repeat it and we marvel at the exquisite unison of thought with music. Even in "The Death of Œnone" the aged hand no "uncertain warbling made".
The poet crossed the bar on 6 October, 1892, his Shakespeare by his side, and his open chamber-window flooded by moonlight. It is probable that we live too near Tennyson to appreciate his greatness. "Men hardly know how beautiful fire is," says Shelley; the phenomenon is too familiar; but later generations will know and understand, and through the darkness of time will follow the light of this "Golden Branch among the Shadows".
Robert Browning.
Born three years later than Tennyson, in May, 1812, Robert Browning's first published poem, "Pauline," appeared in the same year as Tennyson's second volume of verse, namely in 1833. Thenceforward the careers of the two poets were, in some respects, curiously similar, as each "flourished" most decisively in 1840-1850. Browning was a native of a London suburb, his father was a man of very active intelligence, a reader of old books; and though Browning, in boyhood, was educated at a private school, his essential instruction was that which he gave himself in his father's library. At an early age, about 16, he read Shelley, and an intense enthusiasm for Shelley, as a man and poet, pervades his "Pauline". The poem is a monologue addressed to Pauline, on "the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study," as Browning wrote in the dedication of "Sordello". The poem is, naturally, more or less autobiographical; like Wordsworth's "The Prelude," it was intended to be but part of a large work, "so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine—poetry always dramatic in principle," so the author wrote in 1867, and the speaker in "Pauline" is really but as one of Browning's "Men and Women," and "Dramatis Personæ". The work contains several passages of great beauty, written in a "regular" style of blank verse without eccentricity, and is full of promise of success in a path which, later, as far as form is concerned, Browning did not follow. The construction of the paragraphs of blank verse is in places difficult, indeed obscure, a fault which haunted the poet's manner.
Of "Pauline" not a single copy was purchased: and it was with reluctance that Browning, much later, permitted it to appear among his works. His "Paracelsus" (1835) is in form a drama with four characters, and is, again, a story of "incidents in the development of a soul," that of a famous chemist, half mystic, half charlatan (1493-1541) who
determined to become
The greatest and most glorious man on earth.
For him unattainable Science is "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," and her, dead votaries call to him
Lost, lost! yet come!
With our wan troop make thy home.
There are one or two charming lyrics, but there is a weight of prolixity, and almost entire absence of action. The poem, however, obtained for Browning recognition among men of letters and special students of poetry, when he was not yet 24 years of age. He knew Talfourd, whose "Ion" (1835) was a recognized dramatic triumph at the moment; Forster, the friend and biographer of Dickens (with Forster, Browning's relations later were stormy), and Macready, the actor, who (1837) put his "Strafford" on the stage, with but slight success. Browning's dramas intended to be acted have had even less hold on the scenic world than Tennyson's; "A Blot in the Scutcheon," (1843) might have fared better but was thwarted by the internal politics of the stage. "Sordello" (1840), a narrative in heroic verse, though of an original sort that would have puzzled Dry den, was again the study of "a soul," that of a legendary Mantuan mediaeval poet and soldier, mentioned by Dante. The abundance of mediaeval Italian history,—introducing, as familiar to all, matters which were but vaguely known by few,—and the long hurrying sentences, following trains of ideas associated only in the poet's mind, defeated the ordinary reader. As
Here the Chief immeasurably yawned
in a long passage of exposition, so did the world, and "Sordello" was a stumbling-block in the path of the poet's fame.
On the other hand, in "Pippa Passes" (1841) Browning produced a drama partly lyrical, partly in prose, partly in blank verse, full of variety, humour, strength, and charm, and with that vein of optimism which is never unwelcome. Just as Tennyson "came to his own" with his two volumes of 1842, so the works published by Browning (1841-1846) in cheap numbers, as "Bells and Pomegranates," gave assurance of his originality and his greatness. His dramatic lyrics, when they came, were poetry of a new kind, in measures as various as the moods; here was a "garden of the souls" so rich and strange, so full of novelty of incident, of observation in Italy and in England, as had never before been presented to a world which, for the moment, regarded it not. The strangeness in places might throw a shade on the beauty; the poet did not by any means always choose to make audible, in his verse, the music to which, as an art, he was devoted. In 1855 his "Men and Women" did at last win to the favour first of an enthusiastic few, then of all lovers of poetry. The very names of the poems, from "Bishop Blougram" to "In a Gondola," "Porphyria's Lover," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "The Last Ride together," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," "A Grammarian's Funeral," call up a troop of visionary pictures; while "Christmas Eve and Easter Day" (1850) opens Browning's series of meditations on faith and the mysteries of existence. The poet's life, from his marriage to another poet, Miss Barrett (1846), to her death in 1861, was spent, in great part, in Italy, mainly in Florence; and Italian history, literature, art, and politics constantly inspired him.
In 1864 appeared his "Dramatis Personæ," of the same varied character as "Men and Women". Of the new poems the speculations of "Abt Vogler," the musician, of "Rabbi Ben Ezra,"—the faith pronouncing all things very good,—the gallant resolution in face of death of "Prospice," won for Browning the applause of readers who value "thought" in poetry. Of these, many preferred the passages most difficult of comprehension, and found joy in mysteries where the difficulties were really caused by the manner of the poet.
In 1868 a world which had neglected Browning fell with enthusiasm on the four successive volumes of "The Ring and the Book". Here all persons concerned in a peculiarly brutal set of murders of 1698, and many lookers-on, give their own versions and their own views of the characters and events, while the lawyers have their say, and the Pope sums up all in a poem by a fourth part longer than the "Iliad".
The last twenty years of the poet's life were prolific in books very various in character from "Fifine at the Fair" (1872), and "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country" (1873), to "Asolando," in 1889, the year of his death. His "Transcript" from Euripides is not merely rugged, but very quaint. The method is the old method, but a growing wilfulness often mars the results—the defect of Browning's quality. His resolute courage never failed; he was firm on the rock of his belief; but it is probable that he will always be best known by the work of his central period, from "Pippa Passes" to "Dramatis Personæ". He is the poet of love, of life, and of the will to live; here and beyond the grave; and he is the expounder, and, indeed, the creator, of innumerable characters, while, if his poetry lacks "natural magic," and supreme felicity of phrase, his pictures are largely and vigorously designed and coloured. No poet perhaps, save Scott, showed so little of the poet in general society; no man was more kindly and natural in his ways.
Edgar Allan Poe.
Edgar Poe, born in 1809 at Boston, was on the mother's side English, but in genius he was of no nationality. His parents, who were actors, died early, and he was adopted at the age of 2 by a gentleman of Virginia, Mr. Allan, with whom he passed five years in Europe (1815-1820). From the University of Virginia he passed, as poets are apt to do, in the disfavour of his dons, nor did he long abide at West Point, the military school, leaving in 1831 in very unfortunate circumstances. Like Shakespeare in the tradition he "was given to all manner of unluckiness," such as losing more money at cards than he could pay, which estranged his guardian. In 1827, at the age of 18, he had published the now almost indiscoverable volume of verse, "Tamerlane and Other Poems". He betook himself to journalism, writing verses, criticisms (whereby he made many enemies) and short stories. With his genius for these, whether tales of gruesome mystery, or of treasure-hunting, or of a marvellous detective, he would, in the America of to-day, have been rich, as authors count riches. But his pay was infinitesimal, and he lived in dire poverty, always longing for a magazine of his own; but his engagements as an editor were neither permanent nor lucrative. He was, in "The Gold Bug," the founder of all stories of hidden treasure, and all detective stories descend from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". In composing "crawlers," as R. L. Stevenson called tales of horror, he had no rival. He always avoided the supernatural; his effects were mortuary, and he was too partial to premature burials. His style was that of an artist, clean and sober, in "The Gold Bug," but in such pieces as "The Fall of the House of Usher" he aimed at poetical effects in prose. The doors of the doomed mansion "threw slowly back their ponderous and ebony jaws". Poe appears to have had the wish to be a scholar; he may even, by many allusions to unfamiliar books, give the impression that his reading is very wide, but scholarship was inconsistent with his restless and poverty-stricken life. Yet something of the fastidiousness of the scholar possessed him, and made him a student of style, and a relentless reviewer of the many nobodies who formed the majority of his literary contemporaries. His poetry is the very reverse of "a criticism of life". His heroes, if in love at all, are constant to some belle morte, Annabel Lee or the Lost Lenore; and he has no hope of attaining to the love of his most beautiful poem,—
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicèan barques of yore,
(where Nicèan seems to mean Phæacian). He combines the maximum of music in his verse with the minimum of human nature, of flesh and blood. His "Ulalume," with its recurrent and re-echoing double rhymes, trembles on the verge between pure nonsense and some realm beyond the bounds of known romanticism:—
Hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir.
Weir, we surmise, is not far from
the sunset land of Boshen,
In the midmost of the Ocean,
where dwelt the Yonghi Bonghi Bo.
The celebrated "Raven," probably by far his most popular poem, winged his way to Poe's study from the cliffs which frown on the dim lake of Auber. His fancy for ever dwells "out of space, out of time," where it has learned that mysterious music of his which can be parodied, but cannot be recaptured. He has heard the harping of Israfel, and follows it in "a mortal melody".
Thus, in "The Haunted Palace,"
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow,.
(This—all this—was in the olden
Times long ago.)
And every gentle air that dallied
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid
A winged odour went away.
Poe's versification was self-taught, and his verse, so small in volume and so original, was precisely adapted to the dreams of which his poetry is made. He wrote "There is no such thing as a long poem," meaning that no long poem can be uniformly exquisite. Yet he never attained to what is most entirely exquisite, apart from actuality, and dreamlike, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". As has been said of Gerard de Nerval, "his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of this earth, and far from human shores, his fancy haunts graveyards, or the fabled harbours of happy stars "; night is light to him, and daytime is darkness. Like Gerard's, his overword is