CHAPTER III. THOMAS HOOD.-MATTHEW ARNOLD.-BRYAN I. Compara tive criticism. I BRING together the foregoing names of poets, whose works very clearly reflect certain phases of English life and literature. It would be difficult to select three more unlike one another in genius, motive, and the results of their devotion to art, or any three whose relations to their period can be defined so justly by a process of contrast and comparison. This process is objectionable when we are testing the success of an author in the fulfilment of his own artistic purpose; it has its use, nevertheless, in a general survey of the poetry of any given time. Here are the poet of sympathy, the poet of cultured intellect, and the born vocalist of lyric song. The first is thoroughly democratic in his expression. of the mirth and tragedy of common life. The secThree poets. ond equally represents his era, with its excess of culture, subtile intellectuality, poverty of theme, reliance upon the beauty and wisdom of the past. His sympathies may be no less acute, but the popular instinct has deemed them loyal to his own class; his humanity takes little note of individuals, but regards social and psychological problems in the abstract; as for his genius, it is critical rather than creative. The A POET OF THE HEART. last of this trinity is delightful for the troubadour quality of his minstrelsy: a dramatist and song-writer, loving poetry for itself, possessing what the musician. would call a genuine "voice," and giving blithe, unstudied utterance to his tuneful impulses. Hood is the poet of the crowd; Arnold, of the closet; Procter, of the open air: all are purely English, and belong to the England of a very recent day. 73 II. in London, EXAMINING the work of these minor, yet representa- Thomas tive poets, we find that of Thomas Hood so attractive Hood: born and familiar, that in his case the former qualification May, 1799. seems a distinction by no wide remove from the best of his contemporaries. He had a portion of almost every gift belonging to a true poet, and but for restricted health and fortune would have maintained a higher standard. His sympathetic instinct was especially tender and alert; he was the poet of the heart, and sound at heart himself, the poet of humane sentiment, clarified by a living spring of humor, which kept it from any taint of sentimentalism. To read his pages is to laugh and weep by turns; to take on human charity; to regard the earth mournfully, yet be thankful, as he was, for what sunshine falls upon it, and to accept manfully, as he did, each one's condition, however toilsome and suffering, under the changeless law that impels and governs all. Even his artistic weaknesses (and he had no other) were frolicsome and endearing. Much of his verse was the poetry of the beautiful, in a direction opposite to that of the metaphysical kind. His humor — not his jaded humor, the pack-horse of daily task-work, but His youth. his humor at its best, which so lightened his pack of ills and sorrows, and made all England know him was the merriment of hamlets and hostels around the skirts of Parnassus, where not the gods, but Earth's common children, hold their gala-days within the shadow. Lastly, his severer lyrical faculty was musical and sweet: its product is as refined as the most exacting need require, and keeps more uniformly than other modern poetry to the idiomatic measures of English song. Hood failed in a youthful effort to master the drudgery of a commercial desk. He then attempted to practise the art of engraving, but found it ruinous to his health. It served to develop a pleasant knack of sketching, which was similar in quality and after-use to Thackeray's gift in that line, and came as readily to its owner. At last he easily drifted into the life of a working man of letters, and figured creditably, both as humorist and as poet, before the commencement of the present British reign. Yet that portion of his verse which is engrafted upon literature as distinctively his own was not composed, it will be seen, until within the years immediately preceding his death. He thus occupies a niche in the arcade along which our vision at present is directed. His youthful career, in fact, belongs to that interval when people were beginning to shake off the influence of Byron and his compeers, and to ask for something new. It is noticeable that the works of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge separated themselves from the débris, and greatly affected the rising generation of poets, inciting a reaction, from the passionate unrestraint of the romantic school, to the fastidious art of which Keats was the rarest and most intuitive master. HIS EARLY PRODUCTIONS. The change was accelerated by such men as Leigh Hunt, then at his poetic meridian, and a clear, though somewhat gentle, signal-light between the future and the past. Hood's early and serious poems are of the artistic sort, evincing his adherence to the new method, and an eager study of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan models. - in the poems. 1821-30. 75 At various times between 1821 and 1830 were com- Hood's early posed such pieces as "Hero and Leander," manner of “Venus and Adonis"; "The Two Swans," "The Two Peacocks of Bedfont," and "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," carefully written after the fashion of Spenser and his teachers; "Lycus, the Centaur"; numberless fine sonnets; and a few lyrics, among which the ballad of "Fair Ines" certainly is without a peer. Much of this verse exhibits Hood's persistent defect, — a failing from which he never wholly recovered, and which was due to excess of nervous imagination, that of overloading a poem with as much verbal and scenic detail as the theme and structure could be made to bear. Otherwise it is very charming: such work as then commended itself to poets, and which the modern public has been taught to recognize. "Lycus, the Centaur," for instance, reads like a production of the latest school; and Hood's children, in their "Memorials" of the poet, justly term "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies " a "most artistic poem," which "has latterly been more fairly appreciated in spite of its antiquated style." But his own public took little interest in these fanciful compositions of Hood's younger muse, however clearly they reveal the artist side of his nature, his delicate taste, command of rhythm, and devotion to his ideal. These traits were more acceptable in his lads. shorter lyrics of that period, many of which were delicious, and beyond his own power to excel in later Lyrical bal years. His ballads His ballads contributed to the magazines and annuals, then in vogue, with which he was connected - are full of grace, simplicity, pathos, and spirit. All must acknowledge, with Poe, that "Fair Ines" is perfect of its kind. Take this exquisite ballad, and others, written at various dates throughout his life, "It was not in the Winter," "Sigh on, sad Heart,” "She's up and gone, the graceless Girl," "What can an old Man do but die?" "The Death-Bed," "I Remember, I Remember," "Ruth," "Farewell, Life!"; take also the more imaginative odes to be found in his collected works, such as those "To Melancholy" and "To the Moon"; take these lyrical poems, and give them, after some consideration of present verse-making, a careful reading anew. They are here cited as his lyrical conceptions, not as work in what afterward proved to be his special field, and we shortly may dismiss this portion of our theme. I call these songs and ballads, poetry: poetry of the lasting sort, native to the English tongue, and attractive to successive generations. I believe that some of them will be read when many years have passed away; that they will be picked out and treasured by future compilers, as we now select and delight in the songs of Jonson, Suckling, Herrick, and other noble kinsmen. Place them in contrast with efforts of the The verbal verbal school, — all sound and color, conveying no precise sentiment, vivified by no motive sweet with feeling or easeful with unstudied rhythm. Of a truth, much of this elaborate modern verse is but the curious fashion of a moment, and as the flower of grass: grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away." school. "the |