Four Victorian Poets: a Study of Clough, Arnold, Rossetti and Morris/Introductory
FOUR VICTORIAN POETS
INTRODUCTORY
WHEN Byron and Shelley died, the impulse given to poetry by the ideas concerning man, which we now call democratic, was exhausted for a time in English poetry. At the same time the impulse given to poetry by the hatred of them had also been exhausted. There was no passion for or against these ideas left in the nation. And England, thus deprived of animating conceptions concerning man—derived either from the far past or from the present—sank into a dreary commonplace.
Then Keats, who had felt this exhaustion before the death of Bryon and Shelley, finding no ideas in the present, recovered for poetry the ideas of the past. He called on England to live for beauty, and bade her find it in the myths of Greece, and in the stories of romance. In these, he thought—recast so as to manifest the power of love, truth, and beauty—the poet would receive into his heart the impassionating ideas of the past, realise the deep emotion he needed for his work, and give to men the high pleasure which is the use and honour of his art. He has done that for us, he has secured to English poetry a devotion to beauty. But in his own time his effort failed. There was no response. Charmed he never so wisely, England, a deaf adder, stopped her ears. The poetry of Keats awakened no new poetic life in the England of his time; it had no children then.
There was one man, however, who might be called a younger brother of Keats, and whom we cannot class among those who merely kept poetry alive in the years which followed the deaths of Shelley, Byron, and Keats. Charles Wells stands on a higher level than the poets of that weak parenthesis which ended with the rise of Browning and Tennyson in the famous years of 1830 to 1833, When romance was re-born both in France and England. Inferior in genius and in art to Keats, he was his personal friend, and drank of his spirit. But the deadness of the time seized on him and he only produced a single poem—the drama of Joseph and his Brethren. As Keats revealed afresh the beauty of the Greek and mediæval stories, so Wells unfolded the beauty of a Hebrew tale, recast it for modern thought and feeling, and filled its outlines with modern imaginations. Nevertheless, and this marks his power and taste, he did not spoil its simplicity.
When we have read the drama, the old story still stands apart with quiet steadfastness. It is not spoiled by its new clothing. Yet what we read is Western not Eastern, not Hebraic but romantic. The events are the same, but the atmosphere is changed. The characters are fully developed, and distinguished each from each in modern fashion. The great situations are worked out with a close analysis, and into a great complexity quite apart from the Hebrew genius. The ornament is lavish, and the scenery, which the Hebrew story does not touch, is invented, both for Palestine and Egypt, with all the care, observation, and pleasure of a poet who had read the nature-poetry of Shelley and Wordsworth and walked hand in hand with Keats, his lover and friend, through the landscape of England.
The book was published a year after the death of Keats, under the pseudonym of H. L. Howard. It fell out of sight for nearly fifty years when Rossetti, in Gilchrist's Life of Blake, spoke of it as "poetry of the very first class whose time will surely come." Thirteen years afterwards, in 1876, Mr. Swinburne republished it with a preface, in which he over-topped Rossetti's praise by praise of his own, but neither of these fine artists have succeeded in securing for it the general admiration and reading it deserves.
The story of Joseph, ranging from the pastoral life of a wandering tribe to the life and government of a settled kingdom, passing, as it follows the fortunes of Joseph, through a multitude of events, characters, and types of men, and holding in it the fates of the Jewish people, is one of the great stories of the world, and worth an epic treatment, Charles Wells did not feel the world-wide elements in it, but he felt its varied and profound humanity, and naturally, feeling one side more than another, he chose to make of it a drama, not an epic. Into this subject, enlarged by imaginative invention, he could interweave all he knew and loved of human life. And the poem is indeed remarkable for a distinctive, even a weighty representation, in imaginative forms, of the great forces of the life of mankind; of the moral passions, high aims, grave issues, and temptations of individual characters. In the beginning the treatment of these matters is rapid, even superficial, but the latter part is dignified workmanship; as if the writer's life had been solemnised by misfortune into endurance.
The most difficult part of his subject to treat was the temptation of Joseph by Phraxanor, the wife of Potiphar; and it proves the power of Wells that it is the finest passage in the poem, Art demanded that she should be sensual, yet not trivial or base; that there should be qualities in her nature which should lift her, in an imperious personality and passion, above the vulgarity of mere immorality, And there is in her, as conceived by the poet, so great an intellectual power in her passion, so frank and bold a will, without one trace of hypocrisy, that she seems, at a far lower dramatic level, to draw towards Shakespeare's Cleopatra, yet without her vanity, her petulance, her flashes of cowardice and courage. She has no repentance, no hesitation; her wrath is as deep as her furious love, and both are as intellectual as they are sensual. His hand rarely weakens as he draws her; there is scarcely a line which does not add a fresh touch to the portraiture. Moreover, she is set off by the sketch of her attendant, who is a gracious and tender woman, as unlike her mistress as a primrose of the spring is to the crimson rose of summer. The scene with Joseph is managed with reticent dexterity, and the fidelity of Joseph is saved from the awkwardness of the situation by the nob1 ideals, both intellectual, moral, and personal, which Wells, following the story, has given to the character of this leader of men.
To read the whole drama is to wonder why the poet wrote so little. Had he been justly praised he might have done higher work, but total silence greeted his effort, and he also went into silence. This proves that he had not that genius which cannot rest without production, on which public indifference has no influence, and public blame none except fresh impelling. Wells was not of that great crew. He put so much into this poem that he exhausted his genius in it. There are those who, like the fabled aloe, only flower once. Moreover, it is a characteristic of such persons that they have not enough of art to stay their hand when they have said enough. Wells begins and continues the various parts of his subject with power, but the power fails into a certain weakness when he closes them. Thoughts and impressions thin out, not only in weight but in imagination, and the verse itself, mostly full and solemn in sound, loses then its strength in a sweetness too delicate to last. In this magniloquent weakness, he is like some of the Elizabethans, whom indeed he studied. He resembled them in audacious picturesqueness, in inventiveness, in opulent creation of varied characters, and in their love of pageantry. The pageant of the glory of Joseph passing through the city is a splendid invention, blazing with colour and light and companied, step by step, with human interest. Finally, the poem places him within the poetic period in which Shelley, Keats, and Byron wrote. He is too good to be classed among the poets who, after the death of Shelley and Byron did no more than keep poetry alive till Tennyson and Browning appeared.
These poets were imitative, sensational, and sentimental, not possessed by any large or animating ideas. They were possessed only by themselves; they lived in their own shadow and wrote only about it. And they naturally became imitators not creators, rivers that were soon lost in the sand, pale reflections of a glory gone,
There was, first, a set that imitated Wordsworth, who sang of the life of the country, pleasant kindly poets like John Clare, whose three volumes a lazy, rustic squire, yet a lover of country sights and sounds, might read with sympathy, and learn how to deal gently with the poor, and wisely with the land.
Again, there was a set of small versifiers who imitated Byron. They sang with exquisite feebleness of guilty heroes, they sought to be as world-forsaken, as desolately cynical as their model, and they caught his easy music up. Every clerk in a merchant's house, every fantastic lover, made Byronic songs; and the imitation lasted till 1840-50, when Tennyson had taught the imitators a new method.
But the men who were at this time imitated by those who had in their breast some true poetic fire were Shelley and Keats. These inspired Thomas L. Beddoes and George Darley. Beddoes, born in 1803, did "all his poetic work," says Mr. Gosse, "between 1821, when he published the Improvisatore, and 1826 when he practically finished Death's Jest Book." Beddoes was himself aware of the exhaustion of the time. The disappearance of Shelley, he declares, "has been followed by instant darkness, of which whether the vociferous Darley is to be the comet, or tender, full-faced L. E. L. the milk and watery morn, I leave to astrologers to determine. But I prophesy nothing but fog, rain, blight in due succession." The blight fell upon himself. In a few years his invention and power decayed. He took to medicine, misanthropy, and closed in madness, His poems are for the most part fragmentary efforts of a power which had no power to concentrate itself. It is not that his song does not flow unbidden from his lips, as Mr. Gosse thinks, it is that it is too unbidden, not shaped within into clearness, not fed by thought; and its spontaneous utterance, desperately striving by repeated forms of the same idea to express the idea and never lucidly expressing it, was never dominated by the mastery of art crying to him, "Choose the best form and reject the rest." The Bride's Tragedy has not stuff enough in it to furnish more than a single act, and it is thinned out into five. There are a few fine passages, but not a single perfect one, and the passion in it is torn to rage. As to Death's Jest Book, it is a chaos of crude elements, huddled together, with some noble things ill expressed contained in it, but chiefly made up of those bitter playings of his diseased fancy with death and its revolting forms, which prophesied his insanity, and which, whenever they predominate in poetry of any time, proclaim the death of that poetry. For life, and the will to live eagerly, are the breath and fire of poetry.
His lyrics have been highly praised. They are based on Shelley, and on the lyrics of the Elizabethan Dramatists which Lamb's Specimens had now brought into prominence—a book which touched Darley as well as Beddoes, and was a mighty power in Charles Wells. But the lyrics of Beddoes have not enough in them either of humanity or of Nature. The best of them are the lightest, those thrown off in a moment of impulsive fancy. Of the poems, the one I like best is on the story of Pygmalion, a close imitation, even to the tricks of rhythm, of Keats's Endymion.
Charles Darley has been classed among the imitators of Shelley, but not quite justly. An Irishman, born near Dublin in 1795, his first poem, The Errours of Estasie, was probably written in Ireland. His Silvia, a fairy drama half in prose, published in 1827, is a pretty, graceful thing, full of colours and clinking verse. There is not one weighty thought or word in it. Its treatment of Nature is light and pleasant; the characters are quite boneless. There is, however, a description of the faery host in array for festival which is delightfully fancied, elfish, gay, and glancing, Nepenthe, another poem of his, is justly characterised by Mr. Rolleston as an "indescribable rhapsody." He will live by one lyric—"It is not Beauty I demand"—which Palgrave, not knowing who had written it, classed in The Golden Treasury among the anonymous writers of the time of Milton from 1616 to 1700. It is worthy of the Elizabethan lyrics, and Darley's imitation of the Elizabethans passed in it from imitation into creation. This visitation of the Elizabethans is the only English thing about him. He was Irish, with the Irish strength and weakness, and in England the Irish strength diminished and the Irish weakness grew. He is an Irish poet writing in an English atmosphere; that is at the root of him. It is out of the question to class him as a follower of Shelley, or to place him in the roll of English poets. He might be compared with Thomas Moore, but Moore was far above him. In fancy he approached Moore, but he was more superficial, and he was less national. As to his art, the less said about it the better.
Contemporary with these unoriginal poets in this short exhausted period where the sentimentalists— little rivulets of poetry that assumed to be rivers. They received a gracious welcome from a society which did not desire to be disturbed by ideas, which imagined that the materialism it loved to live in would continue for ever, and which was quite willing to indulge a dainty sympathy for the suffering of the world and the starvation of the English poor, provided no one was bold or ill-mannered enough to ask them to surrender a single pleasure or a single guinea. They liked to read about pain and trouble in the past; they hated to read about it in the present. When suffering was known to be over, and made no claim on them—to read of it gave a pleasant flavour to their luxury and to their degraded peace. Therefore they accepted with a barren gratitude Mrs. Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landor, and others who wrote graceful, pathetic, perfumed stories, and pretty lyrics about spring, of love and sorrow, and little deeds of valour, and such religion as their society could accept, religion which promised them in heaven a pleasant extension of their agreeable life on earth.
Mrs. Hemans had a real poetical turn. Her poetry is musical, her love of nature commonplace but truly felt, her copiousness powerless. She had little intellect, and the great matters of humanity did not touch her at all. She was widely read and loved; but all that fame and affection are now gone, so swift is the perishing of the superficial, of that which has no national ideas behind its work. Yet, if we desire to possess an historical example in poetry of this period, we may find in some library on some dusty shelf the volume which contains The Forest Sanctuary and some short lyrics by Mrs. Hemans. They mark her pretty capacity, and they embody the sentimental elements of this worn-out poetic period.
Once more, a small set of poets belonging to this time, undertook the defence and propagation of those orthodox views in theology which Shelley had attacked, which Keats ignored, and which Byron had accepted and hated. The best of these was Robert Pollok, who published in 1827 his Course of Time, a long poem in ten cantos, describing with many episodes and illustrations the condition of man before the last judgment, and the tremendous event itself. It had a certain harsh and hateful power, but its doctrine was as unspeakable as the Turk. The one inference to be drawn from it is, that it was indeed a mercy that a soul like Shelley's should, in the realm of poetry, have denounced a theology which violated every principle of humanity, and have recalled the hearts of men to love and forgiveness as the ground of religion.
These then were the poetic elements in the air of this parenthesis in the story of our poetry. But England was not to remain a prey to exhaustion, a land without ideas, a nation without national emotions on high matters of human progress, a forest with no full-voiced birds to sing in its trees. The democratic ideas, in a new form and fitted to existing circumstances, began to burn again in the poetry, the philosophy, the religion, the social and political realms of England. Deep-seated, wide-spreading emotion, accompanied by serious thinking, stirred the country and the towns, even the universities; and the deaf opposition of the baser conservative elements in society only deepened the excitement. The state of the oppressed and starving poor, whether in the country or in the towns, awoke the wrath of Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer, and in 1827 his passionate poetic indictment of the shameless wealth and comfort, brought by the misery of the workers, ran far and wide, He, like Wordsworth and Crabbe, was the poet of poverty. But he carried it farther than these men, He began the crusade against its evils which has continued to the present day. The return to Nature which Wordsworth sang was good; but Elliott asked, "What have the poor to return to? The life they live is wholly unnatural, not according to Nature." Nor has the voice his poetry began ever failed since, till quite lately, in English song. A cloud like a man's hand was rising, full of menacing fire, into the dead grey sky of England. The democratic ideas were at work again, and their first instalment was the Emancipation of the Catholics, the Reform Bill, and the Repeal of the Corn Laws, events which were the pioneers of a mighty progress. They stirred England to its depths. Men could no longer complain that there was no national passion in the country; and this national passion for new ideas fled, like an angel with wings of fire, over the brains and into the souls of the old men who saw visions and the young men who dreamed dreams, 'Those who were by nature poets received the national emotion, and it stimulated their own. They woke to use both these emotions on their own subjects,—and before four years had passed by Tennyson and Browning began the new life of English poetry. Nor was religion unaffected, Just at the same time these poets began, two great religious movements took their rise. Liberal theology began with Maurice; sacerdotal theology with Keble and Newman. One only of these movements had at first a poet, but he had already written in Oxford, in 1827, The Christian Year. Both movements were full of passion and thought. Both have not only deeply influenced England, but have also done her great and lasting good; and both illustrate afresh the work of the ideas of the Revolution—the one in its attraction to those ideas; the other in its repulsion from them. Thus England emerged from her vile condition of careless and heavy slumber full of sensual dreams. And with her waking, Poetry awoke. And the light of Thought was in her eyes, and the fire of Love in her heart, and of them was Beauty born.
Elliott and Keble were the precursors of this awakening. Elliott began as a poet of Nature. "Farewell," he cried, "to the town and its horrors; let me live on the breast of Nature." The passion of Wordsworth was strong in him, though he had read and loved, but did not justly admire, Keats and Shelley, But as he grew older, he was drawn aside from contemplation of Nature by the misery of the poor, by the starvation the Corn Laws, the manufacturers, and the indifferent landlords imposed on the people. Wordsworth, he thought, had only touched the comfortable poor, Crabbe gave him more truth, and was nearer to his heart—"Crabbe, whose dark gold is richer than it seems"—but Byron had most power over his soul. Byron's anger, force, love of freedom, even his gloom, suited one who had to sing the stern and crying suffering of the people.
Elliott quite understood that Byron would not have cared about the English labourer. But the revolutionary spirit in Byron, his fierce scorn of the oppressor, and his dying effort to free Greece, made him a spirit of power in a mind like Elliott's. Soon, leaving Byron, he took his individual turn, and concentrated and consecrated himself as the Poet of the Poor. And well he did that duty, voicing their silent pain and wrath with unbroken courage, truth, and fervour. At first he wrote poems of some length, after the manner of Robert Bloomfield; and if we wish to know the state of rural England in those days, we cannot do better—and this will illuminate the merely political histories with the light of reality—than read The Patriarch of the Village and The Splendid Village, There, in a lurid light, but a true one, the rustic England of those times is drawn; and its miseries were only less than those of the peasants of France before the Revolution. Then, as the struggle against the Corn Laws deepened, Elliott wrote rough, keen, rousing lyrics, close to the very truth of things, the passion of which smote like a dagger, the reality of which could not be more lucidly expressed, What he saw, he wrote. But this denunciation, and all the fierceness of his poetry, were relieved throughout by a gracious love of natural beauty, a joy in the lovely and quiet world which knit him to the past poets, and carried him forward into those who were to come. Moreover, the springs of pity and tenderness were deep in him, and with these, the fountain of a strong and humble faith in God. These saved the poetry, gave it that high and loving note which lifted it above the angers of denunciation, and enabled it to live.
I have often thought that, bad as things are still in town and country, and much as I wish that the poetry of our own day should now enter into the battle—the progress made in social good during the last seventy years of the last century has been so great, and so well founded on steady and well-organized ideas, that it deserves greater praise than has been given to it. To read the Coronation Ode, written for the Sheffield Working Men's Association, and to compare it with the profound feeling which ran through the nation at the death of the Queen, is to realise this change. If the people had been suffering even half as bitterly as they were suffering when the Queen was crowned, nothing like that which we have seen when she died could have taken place. I quote this ode of his, even though, as poetry, it is not good. It is not, of course, an attack on the Queen, but a cry against the misery, the oppression, and the past policy of the country. Its sad and terrible note sounds almost incredible in our ears.
How the red wreath, with which thy name is bound—
The page which tells the first deeds of thy reign,
Black, and blood-blotted—cheer the Calmuck hound.
Whose growl o'er Brunswick hails thee, cypress-crown'd!
Throned o'er their blood! who would not be a Queen?
The Queen of new-made graves, who would not be?
Of glory's royal flowers the loveliest seen!
So young! yet all that the deplored have been!
The load they bear is more than they can bear!
Beneath it twenty million workers reel!
While fifty thousand idlers rob and glare,
And mock the sufferings which they yet may share!
The curtain rises o'er embracing foes.
But each dark smiler hugs his dagger fast!
While Doom prepares his match, and waits the close!
Queen of the Earthquake; would'st thou win or lose?
O'er broken hearts and children born in vain,
Banner'd with fire! while "thousand men are one"
Sink down beneath its coward wheels of pain,
That crush out souls, through crunching blood and brain.
By men, who only when they died awoke!
Base nobles who o'er France vain darkness spread,
And, goading her faint steeds with stroke on stroke,
Loaded the wain—until the axles broke!
Then saved not thrones from outraged Heav'n's control,
When hunger urg'd up to the cannon's jaws
A sea of men, with only one wild soul!
Hark!—still I hear the echo of its roll!
We can scarcely listen to it without feeling that the main ideas of the Revolution, so long silent in England, were again arising into life. What would England make of them? What would they become in the New Poetry they prophesied and stimulated? The answer poetry gave was no obscure one, The ideas changed their manner; they changed the form of their demands; they were modified by circumstances; but they lived on. They became, not a furious menace from without, but a spirit moving slowly from within, working in quiet ways, infiltrating themselves into almost every sphere of human thought, and moving with dignity, and yet with passion, through the poets from this time till about 1870, when again they began to change their form.
Keble was another precursor of the awakening. That awakening was destined in poetry to be greatly interested in ideas of religion, and one species of these ideas arose in 1827 with the publication of The Christian Year. In this book Keble created a new method and a new aim in religious poetry. The religious poets of the Eighteenth Century were more hymn-writers than poets, but the greater part of Keble's work was quite apart from the inevitable conventionality of the hymn, even when it was written by Cowper. Nor was it fantastic, like that of Herbert, or philosophical like that of Vaughan or More. It was simple, moving on the common meadow-paths of gentle devotion; and its only philosophy was that of the heart of humble men seeking communion with God. At the same time, it bound up with itself a set of large religious ideas. It seized on, and brought into poetry the mighty, emotionalising traditions of the Church from the earliest times; the weight and passion of two thousand years of thought and associated action. It had not force enough to represent the thousandth part of this, but what it did grasp redeemed religious poetry from the narrow limits which confined it to prayer and praise alone. Moreover, it brought religious poetry out of the closed sphere of the inner life into the home, into the trials and temptations of the social life of men and women. The whole range of devotional poetry was expanded. Again, he brought religious feeling into union with the new love of nature for her own sake. The mountains, rivers, woods, and plains, the glories of the morning, evening, and nightly sky, are in his pages, gently, serenely felt. And he used the tender grace, the beauty of the scenery of Palestine, which then began to be well known, to enhance the poetry which dealt with the gospel history. Many of the poems in The Christian Year begin with refined, delicate, and deeply-felt descriptions of nature which are, as symbolism or as teaching, carried on by gracious gradation into the spiritual life. These passages, in their academic peace and delicate feeling, faintly echo Gray, but their loving observation of nature is as true as that of Tennyson. No one has used nature better in the service of the soul. This also was an expansion of the poetry of religion, and it was in harmony with the ideas of the new time.
As to poetry itself, it was possessed of a sweet melody, and the melody was varied into many forms, Its grip on the matters it treated was not always strong; it wavered, and lost its hold only too often; but that is a frequent fault in poets who live in contemplation. I have said that it extended religious poetry into the home and social life of men, but it did this tentatively, and was, naturally enough and chiefly, the poetry of a cloistered soul. But it was, in its own sphere, felicitous, seeking a small perfection, and sufficiently imaginative, though in it the imagination never soared. Above all, it was pervaded by the charm of quiet; of delicate thought and twilight emotion. Historically, it did a great work for the religious movement it was the first to define. Newman added to its poetry some of his own which, though it has taken a high place in the minds of many, seems to be gravely overrated.
These poets opened out the dawn of a new poetic world, and in a few years the sun arose in Tennyson and Browning, moved not only by their own native genius but by the passion of England, now at last awakened into keen life by fresh social, political, artistic, and religious ideas. On them, and their relation to their time and its movements, I have written at large. What I wish now to do, before I come to a discussion of the new elements which entered poetry with Clough and Arnold, is, leaving Tennyson and Browning aside, to follow the ideas of the lesser poets who, in this great awakening, sang the imaginative thinking of mature men, and the devious aspirations of the young.
In the ten years which preceded 1842 when Tennyson collected his poems for the first time, when Browning had published Paracelsus and Sordello, there was, first, one set of poets who rather reverted to Wordsworth than belonged to the new time. They had nothing to do, however, with the half-dead period on which I have written; their poetry was of a steady, temperate, highly cultivated quality. Thought and emotion belonged to it, but it was too philosophic, too much afraid of emotion, and of too curbed an imagination to become of a great or universal influence. It reacted from the more impassioned work of Shelley, Keats, and Byron, to that of Wordsworth—to Wordsworth, not as the youthful poet, but as the poet of The Excursion. Such poetry as that written wildly and loosely by Beddoes and Darley, such sentimentalism as that which flowed from Mrs. Hemans or L. E. L. were painful to men who had now begun to live among great events, and historical movements of thought. Again, in this new noise of the world, which grew louder and fiercer from 1830, this type of men took refuge in the silent love of Wordsworth for quiet things, and not least in his spiritual communion with nature, to whose resting-places they fled, in brief holidays, from the storm and stress of affairs. Moreover, Wordsworth's energetic grasp of the fundamental elements of man's nature, his firm hold on its great and universal truths, appealed not only to middle-aged men, seeking severely for truth in great confusion,—the confusion of a world newly awakened from sleep—but also to young men at the Universities, who were deeply moved by the prospect of a life so full of warring elements, on which they were about to enter. The poets who voiced this reaction to Wordsworth were only a small school, but they expressed the feeling of a large number of persons at this time. The most representative of them was Sir Henry Taylor, whose Philip Van Artevelve was published in 1834. This drama, which may fairly be called philosophical, deals with government, popular disturbance, wars and their conduct, in an age crowded with sudden and bold activities; and is full of action, of various types of men, and of thought on public affairs, And love, treated with some stateliness, even with humour and pathos, legitimate and illegitimate, runs through its seriousness as a secondary not as a principal part of life. The interlude, between the two parts of the drama, is a well-wrought study of a woman who had loved too much and too often for her peace; a creature of impulse and fire, with a born obliquity in her nature. Its lyric form, its natural description of Italy, its revelation of a wildered woman's soul, and her pathetic self-judgment, is the best poetry in the book. In it Taylor let his imagination loose; in the drama he curbed it so closely that it lost charm. He subordinated his poetry to his intellect, and his other dramas are subject to a similar criticism.
Another school of poets which arose in this excited time was the school to which was afterwards given the nickname of Spasmodic by persons who were incapable of writing its poetry. It had a great vogue. Bailey's Festus was praised, and justly, by excellent judges. Sydney Dobell's alder, and The Roman, and the Poems of Alex. Smith received ovations in their day. After fully fifteen years, Professor Aytoun's Firmilian, a Spasmodic Tragedy, exaggerating grossly the faults of the school, killed it. But Festus still continues to claim our admiration for its high poetic qualities. It was published in 1839; and was begun when Bailey was twenty years old. He enlarged it till he died. It embodied a new theology, neither of Newman nor of Maurice, but a layman's theology freed from the limits of authority, of tradition, and of conventional morality. The unbridled thinking, and unmixed self-consciousness of this time—each man thinking himself + a universe—were naturally strongest in the young men, and strongest of all in young poets. That Wordsworthian reversion on which I have dwelt, with its philosophy and quietudes, left the hot-tempered, passionate, aspiring, egotistic young men quite unrepresented. It suited grave men or premature young men, like Stuart Mill, but it stirred rebellion in the impetuous who felt that it left half of life untouched. And the new wine in the land, the emotions of ideas growing into form, and shaping themselves into new circumstances, deepened, as all national movements will, the natural excitement of poetic young men, thirsting for fame and love. Therefore their poems begin, for the most part, with vast soliloquies, many pages long, which describe their soul, its ineffable powers and aims; and their own passion to reach the top of fame, not only in poetry, but in everything. Again, the hunger for love in many forms, moral and immoral, was raised by these poets into a kind of religion. It was necessary, they thought, for their full development as poets that they should go through, in many different women, varied aspects of love in its joys, its miseries, and its remorse. Nothing could be more unlike the view of love which Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Shelley, or Keats expressed. With them it was not the whole of life, and it was always naturally treated. These new poets whipped it into a morbid prominence, sometimes into an imaginative sensuality which pretended to be religious. It was a not unnatural reaction from a school which looked on passion in love as unworthy of a true philosophy of life, or from a school which made it into pretty sentiment. The senses, the appetites are part of human nature. They also are to be presented in poetry, but there, if art represents their base extremes, such art has ceased to be art, and has passed into the science of morbid conditions.
Another element in this poetry was an over-assertive individuality. Each of these poets, to his own thinking, contained all nature and all human nature. To investigate and represent the finity of themselves was their deepest interest, and ought to be the deepest interest of the world. Some even seem to think that they ought to have in their hands all knowledge and all power; the poet, they declare, is the true governor of the world. Each,,at least, believed himself to be the first of poets. / Their egotism is unlimited, but it is the product of their time./ Individualism, as in all periods of quickened life in a nation, had now become one of the ruling ideas of public and personal life. It appears, but modified by true genius, in Paracelsus and Sordello, and in many poems of Tennyson. It continued, and very fully, to display itself in the work of Clough and Arnold; nor did it lessen much till Morris and Rossetti carried poetry into another atmosphere, in which the personal soul was made of less importance. Moreover, it was quite in harmony with the whole drift of political and social opinion. The glorification of individual freedom to act as it pleased, independent of the interests of the whole—the opposite doctrine to that of collectivism— ruled the internal politics of the State, of trade, and of all social questions from 1832 to 1866, when the first blow was concisely administered to individualism. These poems were the exaggerated exposition in art of this individualism.
Then again, this claim of the poets to absolute freedom of self-development made them claim full freedom for national development and for the overthrow of all oppression. The democratic ideas, scarcely represented by Tennyson or Browning, were ever since 1832 quite awake in England. They grew hotter as the years went on. The reactionary work of the French monarchy, the oppression of North Italy by Austria, the condition of Rome and Naples, the treatment of Poland, the state of the poor and the working men of England, multiplied the power of those ideas. They broke into fierce revolt in 1848; and they were represented by these poets. Sydney Dobell's Roman, published in 1849, an indictment of Austria's villainies in Italy, and a claim for a united Italy, with Rome as its centre, ran from edition to edition, and was only one example of poetry filled with sympathy for the struggle for freedom on the Continent. Clough shared in this excitement. Arnold receded from it.
But even more than by fame, love and freedom, these poets were moved by theology, and into their theology each intruded his own special individuality. The theological excitement had begun in and about 1830 in the Universities, and had now extended over the whole of religious England. Tennyson and Browning shared in it, but with a dignity of genius that separated them from the rest. Clough and Arnold were closely involved in it, and all the minor poets of this time took part in the battle. But these poets, whom I now discuss, represented it in separate, individual, unchartered forms—as it expressed itself in the excited souls of laymen who owned no authority of church or sect, and followed no especial form of creed. They made theology in its relation to life, even more than love, the subject-matter of their poetry. But they were not temperate, concise, or conscious of the limitations of thought, like the greater poets; they were sensational, endlessly fluent, and claimed to be at home in regions of thought beyond the sight of man, The problems of theology are discussed by them at such portentous length that one can only explain the great vogue of these poems by a universal excitement on the subject in religious society. The best of them was Festus. It opens, like Goethe's Faust, with God and Satan in colloquy, and Satan is allowed to tempt Festus. It ends with Festus being made King of all humanity and with the immediate destruction of the whole human race. He has, before this, visited with Lucifer Heaven itself and Hell, and all the inhabited planets, and is the friend of several archangels. The scenes are set in Space, in Elsewhere, in Everywhere, in Chaos, and in various parts of the earth, where he develops, with a perfect serenity of conscience, a complete series of different affections for different women. At the end of the poem is the last judgment, and it is worth noting that he was the first of the poets tq teach universal redemption. All the human race are saved; evil has only existed for the development of good; and since the work of Satan has been God's instrument to draw forth good, he and all the rebel host are called back by God to take their original places in heaven, /7dérassons nous, mes enfants, disait le bon Dieu, tout's' expligue.
This universalism was only one of the various phases of religious thought which arose in this time of intellectual excitement, and were naturally represented by the poets. Indeed, more and more, theories and questions of religion caught hold of the poetry of England from 1840 to 1860. /n Memoriam appeared in 1850. The controversy between Newman and his opponents was still hot in Oxford in the forties, and had extended far and wide over England. A liberal theology, into whose tenets I need not enter here, had been well begun, and gathered disciples round it year after year. The authority of the Church was set up against the claim a large class of men made to complete freedom of investigation, criticism, worship, and belief. Others tried to hold the balance between these two extremes, to discover and pave a via media, but instead of one v7a media, different thinkers made many. And beyond the main schools of religious thought, there were guerrilla schools that fought for their own hand. Out of the religious struggle there arose, not only a host of questions concerning doctrinal theology which excited the intellect as much as the passions of men, but also multitudinous questions concerning the problem of human life—its origin, its end, its conduct, its relation to God, and His relation to it, whether our will in it was free or subject to necessity, whether its happenings mastered us or we them—old questions in new shapes. Was its evil good or its good evil, was life itself illusion or reality, what attitude in it was the true attitude of the soul, and a hundred minor problems clashing together like a swarm of atoms. As long as men had faith in the authority of a Church or a Book which revealed the origin and destiny of man in God's will, the divine conduct and sacred laws of being, the redemption of the world by the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ—so long men felt that hope and peace might be attained in the midst of this turmoil of thought, so long they believed that into the darkness light could arise and prevail. But now, at this very time, the discoveries of science and especially of geological science threw doubt on the authority of the Book, and historical criticism, coming from Germany, threw doubt on the Gospel History on which the authority of the Church reposed. Wherever men read and thought, the disturbance which already existed was now deepdeepened, and, as the years went on to the sixties, it deepened more and more,
Into the midst of this whirlpool of thoughts and hopes and passions, political, social, ideal, democratic, but chiefly religious and theological, Clough and Arnold were cast. They came up to Oxford between 1836 and 1840, and remained there, absorbing Oxford and its battlings of thought into their very marrow: and they represent the tempestuous tossing of their time, especially in their early poems, far more than Tennyson or Browning seated above the strife and moving on larger lines were capable of doing.