Clough. George belief, or aspiration toward belief, which he experiences in his more Wordsworthian moods, that Nature imparts to those who love her a revelation of the universal spirit. Most typical of his genius are such poems as The Scholar Gipsy and its companion Thyrsis, an elegy upon Arthur Hugh Clough, which contain all the finest qualities of his poetry-despondency, wistful aspiration, a keen sense of Nature's beauty, and a quiet joy therein, a humanism blent of the Greek spirit and the modern, and a classical might and delicacy of expression. His lyric power is perhaps best seen in the brief and wonderful Requiescat, in the Song of Callicles from Empedocles on Etna, and in such poems as A Southern Night and Dover Beach, with its splendidly managed free rhyming verse. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) represents the same spirit of intellectual questioning and revolt which finds expression in many poems of his friend Arnold; but in his case inspiration is deficient, and this lack is hardly compensated by the humour of his best-known poem, The Bothie of Tober-na- Vuolich (1848), described by himself as a 'long vacation pastoral'. Here he employs a form of hexameter which is both harsh and loose, and compares unfavourably with the craftsmanlike anapaestic hexameters used by Charles Kingsley in Andromeda. In his shorter poems Clough seldom achieves so consummate an image as the famous one embodied in the lines: 6 For while the tired waves vainly breaking, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, The chief works in poetry of George Meredith (1828-1909) Meredith. are Poems (1851), Modern Love and Other Poems (1862), Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883), Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life (1887), A Reading of Earth (1888), The Empty Purse and Other Poems (1892), Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History (1898), and A Reading of Life, with Other Poems (1901). The twofold nature of his verse has been well indicated by his most discriminating critic, Mr. G. M. Trevelyan, in the two chapter-headings which describe him as 'The Poet and The Singer of Strange Songs'. In the first capacity he is the lyrist of Love in the Valley, Modern Love, Phoebus with Admetus, Lucifer in Starlight, The Lark Ascending, and many other poems for ever memorable by their beauty; in the second he is the seer who wrote The Empty Purse, and the Odes to the Comic Spirit and The Spirit of Earth in Autumn-poems which are strange, rugged and sometimes contorted rather than beautiful, and are first and foremost directed toward setting forth his faith. In many poems-for instance, The Thrush in February and Melampus-the two qualities blend, but Mr. Trevelyan's distinction is just and necessary. 1 For an account of this, see the account of Wordsworth given in an earlier chapter. Meredith's greatest and most popular poem is Love in the Valley, of which Stevenson said that it haunted him and made him drunk like wine'. Throughout its stanzas the lover sees the beauty of his beloved reflected in the beauty of the changing year. The poem's fervour of feeling and intense beauty of expression make it one of the greatest English lovelyrics and lyrics of Nature. His earlier poem, Modern Love, written in sixteen-lined sonnets, achieves on the whole less beauty, but is a powerful psychological study in the theme indicated by its name. In the sensuousness and warmth of colouring which inform such poems as Love in the Valley, Meredith is sometimes very near to Keats. His masterly technical skill-e. g. the device by which in Love in the Valley and Phoebus with Admetus he ends alternate lines with a strong double stress-gives his best poems in this class a rare and individual beauty. Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) is perhaps most widely known Christina by the charming fantasy of her youth, Goblin Market; but this Rossetti. was followed by finer and more typical work. Both in form and spirit her poetry differs widely from that of her brother, Dante Gabriel. He had been strongly influenced by the romantic and sensuous aspects of the revival which culminated in the Oxford Movement, but he had disregarded its inspiring faith. Christina Rossetti, on the contrary, avoided the sensuousness and clave to the faith, expressing this in poetry whose simplicity often kindles into a white flame of passion. Lionel Johnson said of her best religious poems that they seem the national hymns of heaven'. She has left a great mass of religious poetry, and much of it is of this high order. Uphill, Passing Away, and The Last Prayer are inspired by her characteristic simplicity and intensity. She has written some perfect sonnets and songs; in the first kind may be noted Remember me when I am gone away, and Monna Innominata; in the second, the universally known My heart is like a singing bird, and When I am dead, my dearest. The Angel in the House (1854-60) of Coventry Patmore is Patmore, a domestic idyll: though it has on the whole been underrated O'Shaughand misjudged, far finer work appears in Patmore's Odes (1868) nessy, and and The Unknown Eros (1877). He won the homage of others. Francis Thompson and the scorn of Swinburne, who parodied The Angel in the House savagely in The Heptalogia. Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881) displays rare charm and delicacy in the Epic on Women (1870), Music and Moonlight (1874), and several other volumes. Robert Buchanan (1841-1901) wrote, sometimes with power, of many subjects-of Scotland in Idylls and Legends of Inverburn (1865), of London in the London Poems (1866), and of Celtic mysticism in The Book of Orm (1870). Lord Lytton (Owen Meredith-1831-1891) wrote much verse, from his pre-Raphaelite drama Clytemnestra (1855) onward to the posthumously published Marah (1892). His work is largely imitative, and seldom achieves beauty of Henley. Wilde. the first order. Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904) is chiefly read in his Light of Asia (1879), a fluent and thinly inspired epic of Buddhism, and in the less notable Light of the World (1891). There is still greater fluency in the work of Lewis Morris (1833-1907) The Epic of Hades (1876-7), Gycia (1886) and other volumes-but with him inspiration is not even thin; it is non-existent. William Cory (or Johnson; 1823-1892) was an Eton master whose two volumes, successively issued in 1858 and 1877 under the title Ionica, contain many poems of classical delicacy and strength. Perhaps his best-known thing is his beautiful adaptation of a Greek epigram by Callimachus; hardly inferior in quality are Mimnermus in Church and An Invocation. The tradition of Praed was carried on in the vers de société of Frederick Locker-Lampson (1821-1895; London Lyrics, 1857). Charles Stuart Calverley (1831-1884) and James Kenneth Stephen (1859-1892) excel in parody and occasional verse; the former's Cock and Bull Story is one of the best parodies ever written. The most popular work of Thomas Edward Brown (1830-1897) is probably his vivid Fo'c's'le Yarns (1881), written in the Manx dialect; but far finer poetry is to be found in his serious English verse, notably in Aber Stations, a poignantly beautiful lament for his dead son, and the Epistula ad Dakyns, rendered intense and exquisite by the poet's passionate faith in Nature. The pupil of Brown, and the friend and over-frank_critic of Stevenson, W. E. Henley (1849-1903) lives in English poetry chiefly through his Book of Verses (1888) and Hawthorn and Lavender (1899). He had a genius for the short lyric, and many of his love poems, e. g. Come where my lady lies, and Dearest, when I am dead, are perfect in their kind. His rugged and defiant paganism found expression in the universally known Out of the night that covers me. His Hospital Verses record with vividness and humour the days of illness at Edinburgh, when he was visited by Stevenson and Baxter. In A late lark twitters from the quiet skies he has left a superb specimen of the English unrhymed lyric. Every line of his verse bears the impress of his vehement and original personality. The spontaneous sweetness and grace of Henley's poetry are English to the core; a lower and more exotic perfection is to be found in much of the verse of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)— most notably in certain of his sonnets, and in such longer poems as Panthea and The Sphinx. An intenser note rings in his splendid apostrophe to England, Ave Imperatrix (1881), and in his poignant Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). Wilde is most widely known by his artificially brilliant dramas, Lady Windermere's Fan (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1894), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1899), but his real strength was not reached either in drama or, apart from the two poems last mentioned, in verse, but in the highly wrought prose of Intentions (1891), his greatest volume, where his passionate love of beauty glows beneath its flaunting veil of paradox and banter. The tragic note of The Ballad of Reading Gaol rings through his fine piece of confessional prose, De Profundis (1905). Among the most notable women poets of this period are Jean Ingelow (1820-1897), whose High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire possesses a power reflected in a few of her other poems; and Augusta Webster (1837-1894), whose best work, poetic and dramatic, occurs in her Dramatic Studies (1866), Portraits (1870), and The Sentence (1887). Francis Thompson (1859-1907) had probably more inspira- Francis tion than any poet of his generation, and many would class Thomphim among the greatest English lyric poets. His earlier son. volumes1 contain some perfect poems in praise of children; and here he shows already that love of rich words and farsought images which runs through all his work. writes in the second of the Sister Songs: In all I work, my hand includeth thine; Whose passion frets my spirit's deepening gorge, Thus he As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine, A simpler and more Blake-like touch appears in Little Jesus. I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds; From the hid battlements of Eternity; Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then Round the half-glimpsèd turrets slowly wash again. His Ode to the Setting Sun and A Corymbus for Autumn have the same rich music. A lighter and not less exquisite strain is sometimes audible in his poetry-for instance, in the concluding lines of July Fugitive. His work suffers from a disability common to all poetry written in the ornate style; when inspiration has passed out of it it becomes not merely disappointing, as does simpler poetry under similar conditions, but exasperating. 1 Poems (1893), Sister Songs (1895), New Poems (1897). John Rupert Brooke. Macaulay. The life of John Davidson1 (1857-1909) was a long fight against hardship and neglect, a fight in which he exulted, though it was to bring him to a tragic death. That suffering and exultation begot some of his finest poetry, notably his Ballad of the Making of a Poet and certain of his Fleet Street Eclogues. His powerful and sinister imagination is at its height in his Ballad of a Nun, and in certain of his shorter lyrics and ballads, as well as in his insufficiently appreciated poetic dramas. The conditions of his life made it necessary for him to write fast and much; and a good deal of his verse has suffered accordingly. In his striking essay On Poetry he exalts blank verse at the expense of rhyme. Rupert Brooke, one of the most bitterly lamented victims of the Great War, left two volumes, Poems and 1914 and Other Poems, which suggest that had he lived he might have risen to almost any height of greatness. As it is, he has left some work of final beauty, amongst which may rank the Sonnetsespecially the six war sonnets-of his later volume. Grantchester is an idyll compact of whimsicality and beauty, and equally whimsical and beautiful are The Great Lover and Heaven. CHAPTER XXXII VICTORIAN PROSE: MISCELLANEOUS Chief characteristics Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude - Other historians : APART from the novel, the most interesting and important prose form of the period, from our present point of view, is literary criticism; and here, as has been already shown, there was remarkable development, both in form and outlook. But the Victorian age was subtle and various, and its literature includes many writers whose aim was not primarily literary. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) is important both as literary critic and historian. He had begun to send articles to the Edinburgh Review shortly after leaving Cambridge; his first contribution had been his well-known essay on Milton. After spending five years in India, he returned to England in 1838, and collected and published in 1843 the essays which had already appeared under his name. The first two volumes of his History of England appeared in 1848, the second two in 1855. In addition to this work he has left several speeches and 1 Fleet Street Eclogues (1893-6), Ballads and Songs (1894), The Last Ballad and Other Poems (1899), Self's the Man (1901), God and Mammon (1907-8), &c., &c. |