CHAPTER XVI. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. SECTION FOURTH: THE POETRY OF THE VICTORIAN AGE. A. D. 1830-A. D. 1870. William IV.:-1830-1837. Victoria:-1837-1870. 1. Leading Poets of the Second Age-Minor Poets.-2. Leading Poets of the Current Age-Minor Poets.-3. Dramatists.-4. Metrical Translators. -5. Contemporary American Poets. 1798. 1. THE poetry of Mrs Browning and Tennyson is the best of the early portion of this period; but, before noticing these writers, we shall allude to a few of the more important of their contemporaries. Thomas Hood was born in London, though by ancestry a d. 1545.} Scotchman. His brief literary career of about twenty years began in 1821 with journalism, to which ephemeral kind of literature his writings belong. The part he played in the creation of modern humorous prose and verse was no unimportant one. The leading comic journal, started shortly before his death, had been anticipated by him in almost all but the name. His life was the Impersonation of a double meaning; for beneath the gay ripple of fun and frolic there flowed an under-current of sadness as deep and solemn as that of the melancholy Jacques. The most characteristic feature of Hood's genius was this combination of contradictories, which gives point to his merriest jest as well as his deepest pathos. His poetry was born of the fancy rather than of the imagination, revealing, as it did, more of apt resemblance than of the profound emotion of creative genius. His earliest pieces were pleasing phantasies after the manner of Keats. In the closing years of his life appeared the finest and most lasting products of his muse. "Miss Kilmansegg," his happiest and most sustained humorous effusion, appeared in the New Monthly (1841), which he edited; the "Song of the Shirt,” in Punch, 1843; and the "Bridge of Sighs," the best of all his poems, was written in the year of his death. The last two show him to be even a greater master of the springs of tears than of laughter. Beautiful specimens as they are of realistic poetry, and of that subtle gift which brings pleasure out of men's misery," they are still more significant in connexion with some of the most difficult social problems of the day. b. 1800. b. 1813. The distinguished historian, T. B. Macaulay, was a poet d. 1859. of an entirely different stamp. His poetry, the graceful accomplishment of a highly-cultivated mind, is pleasing from its melodious rhetoric, and the chivalrous fire of its sentiments. His "Lays of Ancient Rome" were illustrations of Niebuhr's well-known hypothesis; while the Lay on Ivry and the fragment on the Armada are tasteful chronicles in his favourite walk of history. In the late Professor Aytoun were combined Hood's genial flow of d. 1865. spirits and Macaulay's refined appreciation of the chivalrous past. His "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers" form a kind of metrical history of Scotland from Flodden to the last Jacobite rebellion, and abound in patriotic fervour, martial vigour, and strains of pathos. He has left a rich store of fun and wit in his imitations and burlesques. "Firmilian," and the "Bon Gaultier Ballads" (written in conjunction with Theodore Martin), possess a lifelike freshness totally unlike the generality of imitative poems. His racy prose sketches exhibit the same happy gift of genial satire. He commenced his literary career as one of the earliest and most energetic supporters of Tait's Magazine-the first of the Shilling Monthliesstarted in 1835. We cannot sufficiently admire the beauty of his prose style in its rare union of grace, perspicuity, and good taste. We can simply mention the pleasing poetry of Caroline Bowles, Southey's second wife; the long-sustained excellence of the Hon. Mrs Norton (who, not only in her impassioned verse and poetical fairy tales, but in her powerful novels and eloquent pleadings on social themes, worthily sustains, in the third generation, the genius of Sheridan); the vigorous conceptions of Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer; the popular songs of Mackay; the grand ideality of Thomas Aird; and the elegant verse of Lord Houghton; and proceed to a detailed notice of the leading names of this time. b. 1810. The life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, sustained through d. 1861. half a century despite fragile health, convinced the world, once for all, that sublime genius, equally with lowliest worth, owns no distinctions of sex. Mrs Browning appeared after a succession of popular poetesses, but speedily took rank far above them, and - we now remember her, along with the Laureate and her husband, as a singer not of mere fluent sweetness, but of thought and imagination of the rarest kind. Her earliest works-an essay on Mind, and a translation of the Prometheus of Eschylus-were evidence at once of severe taste and masculine vigour of intellect. After her marriage in 1846, she removed with her husband to Italy, leaving a reputation which in the eyes of the appreciative few had been vastly heightened by a previous collection of profoundly imaginative poems. One of these, the "Drama of Exile," stands as a sort of complement to Paradise Lost, in its special reference to the experience of Eve, borne down by consciousness of guilt, yet ennobled by self-sacrifice. This poem, as well as the Sonnets, breathes the holy fervour of the finest religious poetry. The latter, worthy to rank with those of Milton and Wordsworth, abound in that intense personal emotion which has always been the special charm of .such compositions. In Italy, as formerly in England, Mrs Browning led that secluded life from which her art suffered in completeness. The Revolution of 1848 broke in on this seclusion, and won for Italian freedom her most ardent sympathies. From the windows of her Florentine home-the Casa Guidi-she describes the stirring events of that time in a strain of passionate moralizing, full of practical energy and poetic fire. The vehement feeling, not to be tamed into musical smoothness, which she could at all times infuse into her themes, was now intensified by a definite object, pursued with singleness of heart, yet not without the prejudice of a partisan. We see this characteristic energy, combined with other qualities, at its best in "Aurora Leigh "-regarded by its author as the most mature of her works. It is a modern novel in blank verse, longer than Paradise Lost, as full of passionate fire as Childe Harold, and as thoughtful in its semi-philosophy as the Excursion. The metrical novel, now common, was anticipated last century in Miss Seward's "Louisa" and in Crabbe's Tales. "Aurora Leigh" is a poetess who tells the story of her life, sometimes in fervid bursts of imaginative thought, relieved by beautiful descriptive landscapes and powerful delineation of character and incident; sometimes in prosaic commonplace, interspersed with jarring colloquialisms, but everywhere showing uncommon sweep of thought, sage observation, and a firm grasp of what is most real and heroic in modern life. The mechanical breaks in the printed page form a silent criticism on the irregularity of the thought; while the materials of the story are as incongruous as the style. The whole poem is a monument of the rare intellectual strength, the lofty imaginative genius, and the unequal art of its gifted authoress, who now lies in the sacred land of song where reposes the dust of Shelley and of Keats. b. 1810. ·} 2. Our survey now brings us to the Laureateship of Alfred Tennyson, whose career of forty years connects the second quarter of the century with that now current. Like Heber and Macaulay, Tennyson first distinguished himself—when only nineteen years of age-in a university prize poem. He is the son of a Lincolnshire clergyman, and the youngest of three brothers—all more or less gifted with poetical talent-in conjunction with the second of whom his earliest efforts saw the light. In 1842, despite much discouragement, Tennyson published a large collection of poems, containing, along with some obscure conceits and mannerism, those gems of lyrical melody which establish, in the opinion of many, his most genuine claims to fame. Here we find those universal favourites, "The May Queen," "Dora," "The Miller's Daughter," "Locksley Hall," and "The Lotos-Eaters," poems which present such a rare combination of delicate thought, matchless melody, and genial sympathy with Nature in her calmer moods, that they stand alone within the range of modern poetry, and must be placed by the side of Milton's early lyrics-they, too, unequalled in their time. Tennyson's next work was "The Princess, a Medley," a poem on a novel plan, being substantially an epic narrated in a series of lyrics, whose beauty lies in its detached passages; thereby showing that as yet the poet had not quitted the meditative mood of the ballad for that union of epic narration and lyrical reflection which he has since cultivated. The premature death of a college companion, a son of Hallam the historian, gave occasion for the "In Memoriam," one of the most remarkable poems of the century, combining, as it does, the subtlest phases of recent speculation with Goldsmith's picturesque description, and the mournful pathos of Lycidas. While still singing those lyric strains which charmed his early admirers, the Laureate has alternated between mythical epic pictures and the tragic complications of modern society. "Maud," one of his most striking and novel essays in the latter field, is a dramatic monologue exhibiting all the varied modulation, involution of narrative, and subtle symbolism, so characteristic of this poet. Its hero, a youth of delicate sensibility and culture, has his views of life soured by the recollection that his father had died by his own hand, the victim of commercial speculation. His splenetic cynicism, mellowed for a time by his love for Maùd, is revived through a tragic incident; and the dreamlike rhapsody which succeeds is dispelled by the outbreak of war, when the aimless unrest and passion of the hero give place to practical energy. The whole poem is another "Locksley Hall," painted on a wider canvas and in deeper colours. "Enoch Arden" is still another proof that Tennyson is a poet of the living present; but it is to be regretted that its profound pathos and touching incident win our sympathies for what is morally wrong and false. In the "Mort d'Arthur" and "Sir Galahad," the Laureate early struck that mine whence he has since enriched at once his age and his own fame with precious treasures. The cycle of Arthurian myth has formed an inexhaustible store of poetry and romance, and enchanted the medieval chronicler and the warm imagination of modern genius. Springing out of Welsh mountain scenery, and coloured by the heroic sublime, caught from long and desperate resistance to invasion, these scattered legends were collected in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a refugee who had found shelter from the Saxon in hospitable Bretagne. Dimmed by the lapse of time, they were renovated in the reign of Edward IV. by the kindly hand of Sir Thomas Mallory; and we know that while Milton was casting about for the subject of a great epic, his eye rested fondly on the tale of Arthur and his Knights. And, as in Augustine Rome a great national poet blended the dreams of a Trojan ancestry with the social and political progress of his time, so now our Laureate weaves out of his country's origines a tissue of modern sentiment and civilisation all aglow with elf-land romance. He has gone beyond the monkish chronicle of Geoffrey, and in ancient Cymric poetry found the materials from which it was compiled. The irregular publication of the Laureate's Arthurian Restorations somewhat marred their effect, to us at least. We might have had the epic of the Round Table narrated as a whole, with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. As it is, we have the romance of Camelot and the passionate deeds of its nobles reproduced in a series of exquisite pictures, each complete in itself, and contributing at the same time to the general epical effect. The 'Coming of Arthur" stands as the prologue to the epic, the body of which is found in the six beautiful idylls of Enid, the "chaste Griseld" of Camelot; Elaine, a tragic tale of unrequited love; the weird and powerful "Vivien;" the "Quest of the Holy Grail," the mystic cup whence was quaffed the first Eucharist; "Pelleas and Etarre," a painful episode in the general story; and the intensely passionate "Guinevere." "The Passing of Arthur" forms the epilogue to this profoundly significant tragedy. How the Arthurian society of the castle and the palace lives again in these glowing pictures! What a magnificent panorama of heroic life do they present! Here is magnanimity tarnished by flaws within and a vicious atmosphere without: here are the finest natures undermined and ruined by the leaven of moral wrong and falsehood. Let us read, 66 |