Recent

errors and affectations.

F

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED.

EW of the minor poets belonging to the middle division of our period have been of the healthy and independent cast of Kingsley, Thackeray, Thornbury, or Aytoun. Some have servilely followed the vocal leaders, or even imitated one another,—the law of imitation involving a lack of judgment, and causing them to copy the heresies, rather than the virtues of their favorites; and we are compelled to observe the devices by which they have striven, often unconsciously, to resist adverse influences or to hide the poverty of their own invention.

The Rhap

sodists; or

the "Spas

modic"

school.

“Firmilian."

I.

THE Chartist or radical poets, of whom we have just spoken, were the forerunners of a more artistic group whose outpourings the wits speedily characterized by the epithet "spasmodic." Their work constantly affords examples of the knack of substitution. Mention of Aytoun reminds us that he did good service, through his racy burlesque, Firmilian, in turning the laugh upon the pseudo-earnestness of this rhapsodical school. Its adherents, lacking perception and synthesis, and mistaking the materials of poetry for

THE RHAPSODISTS.

poetry itself, aimed at the production of quotable passages, and crammed their verse with mixed and conceited imagery, gushing diction, interjections, and that mockery of passion which is but surface-deep.

Fames

263

Bailey was one of the most notable of this group, Philip and from his earliest production may be termed the Bailey: founder of the order. Festus certainly made an im- 1816pression upon a host of readers, and is not without inchoate elements of power. The poet exhausted himself by this one effort, his later productions wanting even the semblance of force which marked it and established the new emotional school. The poets that took the contagion were mostly very young. Alex- Alexander ander Smith years afterward seized Bailey's mantle, 1830-67. and flaunted it bravely for a while, gaining by A Life-Drama as sudden and extensive a reputation as that of his master. This poet wrote of

"A Poem round and perfect as a star,"

Smith:

but the work from which the line is taken is not of that sort. With much impressiveness of imagery and extravagant diction that caught the easily, but not long, tricked public ear, it was vicious in style, loose in thought, and devoid of real vigor or beauty. In after years, through honest study, Smith acquired bet ter taste and worked after a more becoming purpose. His prose essays were charming, and his City Poems, marked by sins of omission only, may be rated as negatively good. "Glasgow" and "The Night before the Wedding" really are excellent. The poet became a genuine man of letters, but died young, and when he was doing his best work. Massey, another emo- Gerald tional versifier, came on (like Ernest Jones, went out more speedily) in the wake of the Chartist|

who Massey:

1828

264

George Macdonald: 1824

David Gray: 1838-61.

BAILEY.—SMITH.—MASSEY.—MACDONALD.

movement, to which its old supporters vainly sought to give new life with the hopes aroused by the continental revolutions of 1848. He made his sensation by cheap rhetoric, and the substitution of sentiment for feeling, in an otherwise laudable championship of the working-classes from which he sprang. Sympathy for his cause gained his social verses a wide hearing; but his voice sounds to better advantage in his songs of wedded love and other fireside lyrics, which often are earnest and sweet. He also has written an unusually good ballad, "Sir Richard Grenville's Last Fight."

The latest of the transcendental poets is Macdonald, who none the less has great abilities as a preacher and novelist, and in various literary efforts has shown himself possessed of deep emotion and a fertile, delicate fancy. Some of his realistic, semi-religious tales of Scottish life are admirable. "Light," an ode, is imaginative and eloquent, but not well sustained, and his poetry too often, when not commonplace, is vague, effeminate, or otherwise poor. Is it defective vision, or the irresistible tendency of race, that inclines even the most imaginative North-Country writers to what is termed mysticism? A "Celtic glamour" is veiling the muse of Buchanan,-of whom I shall write more fully hereafter, so that she is in danger of confusing herself with the forgotten phantoms of the spasmodic school. The touching story and writings of poor Gray — who lived just long enough to sing his own dirges, and died with all his music in him — reveal a sensitive temperament unsustained by co-ordinate power. Possibly we should more justly say that his powers were undeveloped, for I do not wholly agree with those who deny that he had genius, and who

DAVID GRAY.

think his work devoid of true promise. The limitless
conceit involved in his estimate of himself was only
what is secretly cherished by many a bantling poet,
who is not driven to confess it by the horror of im-
pending death. His main performance, "The Luggie,"
shows a poverty due to the want of proper literary
models in his stinted cottage-home.
It is an eigh-
teenth-century poem, suggested by too close reading
of Thomson and the like. Education, as compared
with aspiration, comes slowly to low-born poets. The
sonnets entitled "In the Shadows," written during the
gradual progress of Gray's disease, are far more poet-
ical, because a more genuine expression of feeling.
They are indeed a painful study. Here is a subjec-
tive monody, uttered from the depths, but rounded
off with that artistic instinct which haunts a poet to
the last. The self-pity, struggle, self-discipline, and
final resignation are inexpressibly sorrowful and tragic.
Gray had the making of a poet in him, and suffered
all the agonies of an exquisite nature contemplating
the swift and surely coming doom.

265

II.

AFTER the death of Wordsworth the influence of Influence of Tennyson Tennyson and that of Browning had more effect upon and Brownthe abundant offerings of the minor poets. In the ing. work of many we discover the elaboration and finesse of an art-method superadded by the present Laureate to the contemplative philosophy of his predecessor; while not a few, impressed by Browning's dramatic studies, assume an abrupt and picturesque manner, and hunt for grotesque and mediæval themes. Often False simplicity. the former class substitute a commonplace realism

266

Balzac on

the true mission of Art.

INFLUENCE OF TENNYSON AND BROWNING.

for the simplicity of Tennyson's English idyls, just as the latest aspirants, trying to cope with the PreRaphaelite leaders, whose work is elevated by genius, carry the treatment beyond conscientiousness into sectarianism, and divide the surface of Nature from her perspective, laying hold upon her body, yet evaded by her soul. Balzac makes a teacher say to his pupil: "The mission of Art is not to copy Nature, but to express her. You are not a vile copyist, but a poet! Take a cast from the hand of your mistress; place it before you; you will find it a horrible corpse without any resemblance, and you will be forced to resort to the chisel of an artist, who, without exactly copying it, will give you its movement and its life. We have to seize the spirit, the soul, the expression, of Aphorisms beings and things." Many of Blake's aphorisms express the same idea. "Practice and opportunity," he said, very soon teach the language of art. Its spirit and poetry, centred in the imagination alone, never can be taught; and these make the artist. Men think they can copy Nature as correctly as I copy the imagination. This they will find impossible. Nature and Fancy are two things, and never can be joined; neither ought any one to attempt it, for it is idolatry, and destroys the soul."

of William Blake.

Coventry
Kearsey
Dighton

1823

66

Coventry Patmore, not fully comprehending these truths, has made verses in which, despite a few Patmore: lovely and attractive passages, the simplicity is af fected and the realism too bald. A carpet-knight in poetry, as the younger Trollope latterly is in prose, he merely photographs life, and often in its poor and commonplace forms. He thus falls short of that aristocracy of art which by instinct selects an elevated theme. It is better to beautify life, though by an