Ballads. Mr Morris had, if not excelled - he never did excel-the best things in The Defence, varied his appeal into longer strains and more popular tone in The Life and Death of Jason (1866), and The Earthly Paradise (1868-70). And at last, the inspirer, after a fashion, of both, and the man who fished this new murex up, had broken his long silence in the Poems, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, of 1870, which were followed ten years later by another volume; while Mr Morris made additions to his list in Love is Enough (1872), Sigurd the Volsung (1876), and Poems by the Way (1891). Very seldom have three poets helped each other in such a singular fashion by exhibiting the same general conception of poetry, applied with the utmost individuality of taste and quality. Mr Morris, after his first predilection for Froissart and Malory, turned to Scandinavian, classical, and other literature, and developed a faculty of verse-narrative unsurpassed since Scott, producing also, latterly, a kind of sagaromance in prose. Mr Swinburne, the most cosmopolitan of the three, was by preference, if anything, Greek and French; Rossetti1 was the first English poet since the seventeenth century to give the real Italian sentiment of his Italian blood in the language of his English country. We must not dwell on the individual documents of their craftsmanship, more's the pity. But from "The Blessed Damozel" herself 1 Rossetti was, like Sainte-Beuve, a quarter-Englishman. The devotees of the race and milieu theory might employ themselves worse than in comparing the result of three-quarter French blood born and brought up in France, and three-quarter Italian born and brought up in England. to "Rose Mary," and from "Rapunzel" to "Meeting in Winter," not to mention that most plenteous harvest which is not yet gathered in, there is nothing but pleasure for the lover of poetry. Their especially The very strong pictorial element in all three, and in all their followers (who for some years crammed the courts of minor poetry to suffocation, and characteristics, still are not unfrequent there), has been of metrical. course set down to Rossetti's professsion, and to the fact that Morris himself was a painter manqué, and a decorator born. It would be absurd to deny all influence to these facts; but the characteristic was in all probability in much larger degree merely an intensifying of the tendencies described above, and already shown by their father Tennyson and their grandfather Keats. For the musical appeal developed equally; and none of the three (so far as is known to the present writer) had any professional connection with music. But this last was helped by the special metrical gifts of all. Mr Morris, at first a master of singularly weird and haunting melody, dropped these Eolian strains later for metres always excellently modelled but more suitable for narrative than the eery notes of The Wind and The Blue Closet. Rossetti, supreme in the sonnet, is hardly less supreme in any slow measure that he chooses to adopt, and very seldom tries fast ones. As for Mr Swinburne, prosody has no difficulties that he cannot master. He can be excellent in slow measures, though his extreme fluency is rather a danger to him there. But at high velocities he has no rival. If the simile of the conjurer were not supposed (why, one does not quite know) to be degrading, no other could be so suitable for his absolute command of metres of any intricacy, velocity, variety, moment, and length. succeeded. There are those who would represent this movement in poetry as exhausted, just as there were those who Their school represented Tennyson's as exhausted thirty as yet un- or forty years ago. This is probably, as that was certainly, a mistake. One of the halts, or apparent refluxes, which so often occur in literature has indeed been observable in the verse of the last ten or fifteen years of the nineteenth century and later. Restless or ambitious persons have in some instances-not entirely without success-endeavoured to struggle against both, very much after the manner in which Mr Arnold struggled against the first. They have gone back to Mr Arnold himself, or, farther, to his master, Wordsworth, for a sort of poetical quietism; they have decried, as much as they could, the poetry of tapestry and painted window, the poetry of inarticulate music accompanying the articulate. Others have even revived, after himself or his other master Heine, the Arnoldian rhymelessness; others again have cultivated-with very considerable success at times-looser, more popular, less elaborately artistic strains, depending largely on adjustment to events of the moment or moods of the hour. We have had "Celtic Renascences anticipated, by the way, and given for far more than they are worth anywhere else, by Tennyson himself in The Voyage of Maeldune; "Decadences"; sentimentalities and antisentimentalities; all sorts of "'nesses and 'tudes and 'ties," to borrow Hobbes's scornful phrase, differentiated occasionally by those popular triumphs of what is not poetical at all, of which the safe example in our period and the period before ours is Martin F. Tupper (1810-1889), but of which it would be possible to give instances much more recent and far more hopeless. But there has been no real new school of poetry since the pre-Raphaelite, and it is scarcely rash to doubt whether there soon will be any. There is no room for new schools of poetry in an age where every one reads, until some very new and very vigorous schoolmaster makes his appearance. In the whole of such a book as this, but in these later volumes more especially, it becomes, as one has Other principal to remind the reader, impossible, and what figures. is more undesirable, to give a mere compterendu of the second-, much more of the third- and tenth-rate writers of the time. We have sketched in broad lines the main course of the river of poetry in England from 1850 to 1900. We shall endeavour in the conclusion to sketch the relations of these lines to the earlier meanderings. It only remains here to mention, with brief characterisations, some individuals remarkable for performance not of the second-rate kind. They were not numerous at the beginning,the generation of 1850 scarcely won its way through the slough of "discouragement," even in the case of Mr Arnold; that slough caught and clutched and kept men like Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), clogged the wings of men like the second Lord Lytton (1831-1891), tempted the Spasmodics into their forcible-feeble efforts to get clear of it. The pre Raphaelite movement had a healthier, or at least a less foiled and baffled, fringe. The exquisite genius of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) gave us our greatest English poetess (for the rough and scanty essays of Emily Brontë and the sentimental slovenliness, half redeemed by better things, of Mrs Browning, cannot really stand in the comparison) with Goblin Market (1862) and The Prince's Progress (1866), and a hundred delightful things, from "Sleep at Sea" to Heaven overarches sea and land." With less of the Paradise and more of the Purgatory, Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881) (An Epic of Women (1870), Music and Moonlight (1874)), and James Thomson the Second (1834-1882) (The City of Dreadful Night (1880)), displayed that strange faculty of producing great poetry without being exactly great poets which is almost a note of the nineteenth century, and had been struck first long before them by Beddoes. Probably some SainteBeuve of the future will group these three with at least one living poet to show what a real, though what a curiously constituted, spirit of poetry was abroad at the time, and what exquisite lyric at any rate it could utter. Christina Rossetti, At no other, perhaps, could this group (which as to the three named poets we can characterise without difficulty) have existed; certainly at none (unless we can suppose a pair of Pagan O'Shaughnessy. singers contemporary with Prudentius and exhibiting his characteristics, with the Pagan difference) is it easy to imagine one displaying such identity Thomson, |