Edward FitzGerald.

Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883), a contemporary at Trinity College, Cambridge, of Thackeray and Tennyson, was in later life the friend of both. Though he vehemently admired Tennyson\'s poems up to 1842, he never was quite contented with them later; yet detested all the work of both of the Brownings, as if jealous of the supremacy of his friend. He was, indeed, a humorous person, and a person "of humours," in Ben Jonson\'s sense of the word. He was a great reader, a delicate and sound critic, where prejudice did not interfere; a most interesting letter-writer; and, for the rest, passed away his life with his books, his garden, his boat, and his pipe. Nothing of the little that he wrote, for example, translations from ?schylus and Calderon, reached the public, nor for long did his very free version of quatrains in the Persian, attributed to Omar Khayyám, an astronomer. It is impossible here to discuss how many of these quatrains are really, by Omar, how many are masterless verses assigned to him by tradition, and how much of the merit of the "Rubáiyàt" is due to FitzGerald. But it is hardly too bold to say that but for the new music and melancholy of FitzGerald\'s verse, but for FitzGerald\'s own contribution of a sad and humorous stoicism under an Epicurean wash of colour, Omar and his company would never have been known to the general English reader. The slim pamphlet of the "Rubáiyàt" (1859) was "a drug in the market" till the set of Rossetti and Swinburne discovered it and talked about it. Then a wider circle of young University men made it an idol; to adore[Pg 595] it was a sign of grace; and, in the long run, to admire Omar and the old French tale of "Aucassin et Nicolete" became a substitute for a liberal education. It was no longer necessary to have read anything else. It was not FitzGerald\'s fault that the saying of the Alexandrian Philistine in Theocritus, "Homer is enough for all," became "Omar is enough for all". But, though idolised by the worst judges, FitzGerald\'s little masterpiece remains a very original and, in Wordsworth\'s phrase, "a very pretty piece of paganism". His letters are probably the best and most interesting of any letters much concerned with literature that have been published since those of Byron.

George Meredith.

As a poet, Meredith attained, when he chose (and he often did choose) to a pitch of obscurity no less deserving of admiration, and of interpretative commentaries, than the darkest verses of Browning. He did not begin in this manner; his early verses, such as "Juggling Jerry," "The Old Chartist," "Marian," "Love in the Valley," have the charm of being fresh, natural, and easily readable by him who runs; while, like most of Meredith\'s verses, they are the poetry of a lover of the Earth, with all that she bears and nourishes. Many poems read like hymns to Earth by an Earth-intoxicated pagan. But "Modern Love"—a long sequence of pieces of sixteen lines, which exceed the sonnet in length without possessing its answering and echoing rhymes—contains a story, and a sad story, of the pangs of two wedded lovers. What that story is, perhaps some commentator has told in prose; if not, the poet needs such a commentary. The preluding sonnet to "Modern Love" may contain the secret, it closes thus:—

But listen in the thought; so may there come
Conception of a newly added chord,
Commanding space beyond where ear has home.
In labour of the trouble at its fount,
Leads Life to an intelligible Lord
The rebel discords up the sacred Mount.

We "listen in the thought," but conception of a newly added chord does not readily arrive, not where ear has home at all events,[Pg 596] and nothing leads us to an intelligible Lord, if that means an intelligible poet. Persons cultivated enough to love English poetry more obscure than an "unseen" piece of Pindar, find much matter in verses like these.

The two lovers, married apparently, in "Modern Love," are "condemned to do the flitting of the bat," but, in the dark, we lose sight of them, and can only admire luminous breaks of two or three lines here and there, glow-worms in the darkness of the grass. The mystery of Byron\'s "Manfred," reckoned fine in its day, the new poet explains as "an after dinner\'s indigest". Byron, no doubt, could have said something not less witty about "The Nuptials of Attila".

Meredith\'s manner, in short, "is not of the centre". Great poets rarely conceal their meaning like hidden wealth; he who does so, values too cheaply the leisure of the reader, or values too highly the reader\'s industry and ingenuity.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Elizabeth Barrett, later the wife of the poet Robert Browning, was born on 6 March, 1806 (died in 1861). Her father was a man of considerable wealth and eccentricity; at least he appears to have resented almost as much as Queen Elizabeth the idea of any one marrying. His daughter had a good education, some knowledge of Greek, and wrote verse early. In several of her most pleasing verses, such as "Little Ellie," and "Hector in the Garden," we hear echoes of the memories of her childhood. She translated from the Greek, and also wrote a kind of romantic ballads (not in the manner of the Border ballads) which had abundant life and movement. She took up the cause of children overworked in factories at an age when they should not have worked at all. Her health became deplorable, her life that of a valetudinarian, till, in 1846, Robert Browning married her and took her out of her father\'s sphere of influence. Thenceforth her health improved; at this time her fame and popularity as a poet of great variety and passion far exceeded those of the author of "Men and Women". Her sonnets, really original, though published as "From the Portuguese" were not so popular as her lyrics and romances, but her[Pg 597] genius, somewhat too eager and careless, especially in her recklessness of correct rhymes, was in need of the formal restraints of the sonnet. Her "Casa Guidi Windows" (1851) and other poems displayed her enthusiasm for a free and united Italy; her "Aurora Leigh," a tendenz novel in verse, attracted much attention, if it does not bear the test of time so well as her briefer poems; her "Poems before Congress" were of somewhat temporary interest. Mrs. Browning, with Miss Rossetti, holds the highest place among the women-poets of England, but her Muse is neither trimly girdled nor neatly shod; and her manner not infrequently does injustice to the pity and passion of her sympathies, conceptions, and emotions.

Christina Rossetti.

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) as a poet resembled her brother as much as a woman who lived a somewhat fugitive and cloistered life, practising the rites of her religion and in the exercise of good works, could resemble an artist so unapt for self-control as Dante Rossetti. Both felt the same half-exotic influences of a family half-Italian; both shared the same early enthusiasm for mediaeval art, and there is a certain sameness in the colour and harmonies of their verse and in their use of words. In 1862 Miss Rossetti published, in brief, irregular rhymed lines, "Goblin Market," a tale of the affection of sisters dwelling in a rural England that marches with a country of fantastic malevolent elves, a species of fairy of her own invention. The whole effect is magical yet moral "which is strange," and the moral is not strained or didactic, but natural, and a great part of the charm of this delightful composition. "The Prince\'s Progress," in the same way, is suggested by the beautiful tale of "The Black Bull of Norroway," but the suggestion is remote and the bewitched Prince comes too late to his bride. The best lyrics of the author are singularly musical with an anticipation of some of Swinburne\'s effects, as in "Dreamland".

She left the rosy morn,
She left the fields of corn,
For twilight lone and lorn
[Pg 598]And water springs.

Through sleep as through a veil,
She sees the sky look pale,
And hears the nightingale
That sadly sings.

"When I am dead, my dearest," is not less musical and melancholy. Many of the sacred poems have great sincerity as well as original beauty of form; and some of these, with some of the sonnets, half reveal the sorrow of a life and its religious consolations,—see the sequence of sonnets styled "Monna Innominata" and "Later Life". She is, indeed, a true poet of the inner life and of nature. To institute comparisons between her and Mrs. Browning is apt to cause injustice to either or to both.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

While Tennyson was in the mid-flush of his fame, there arose a school, in poetry and pictorial art, which, like him, turned to the Middle Ages for subjects and inspiration, but also reverted to the ideals of the great Italian painters who were before Raphael. The leader and the eldest of the little Brotherhood was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, son of Gabriel Rossetti, a devout interpreter of Dante, and of his wife, a Miss Polidori, a kinswoman of Byron\'s strange and ill-fated young Italian physician. Dante was born in 1828, from his earliest days wrote verses and drew, and, after passing through King\'s College School, became a student of art, and a painter whose colour was undoubtedly excellent, while his subjects were chosen from religion and romance; his portraits being in a high degree romantic, and his mannerisms tending towards the monotonous. They were the paintings of a poet; and his poetry is that of a painter. While some of his poetry, like "The Blessed Damozel," his most characteristic piece, appeared early in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine" (1856) and "The Germ," he published no book before 1861, when his translations from the early Italian poets gave evidence that, as a translator, he was unique and unapproached. Bizarre circumstances, connected with his grief for the death of his wife, delayed the appearance of his collected sonnets and other verses till 1870, when the work excited enthusiasm among all who desired some new thing in poetry; while certain[Pg 599] mannerisms of slight importance spoiled the pleasure of others, and the choice of themes in two or three cases offended the precise. Indeed, the sonnet has no wide popular appeal, and the sequence styled "The House of Life," with its kind of mysticism proved nearly as puzzling, in another way, as the sonnets of Shakespeare. The pictorial and visionary beauty and the novel harmonies of the verse, could not but be admired. The ballads were too artificial for the ballad farm, which is nothing if not simple, though the ballads also have Rossetti\'s special note and impress, his colour, passion, mystery, and romance. Rossetti, after many years, vexed by insomnia and by sleepy drugs, died in 1882. It is not easy to say whether he was fortunate or unfortunate in that the newness of his manner had been to some extent anticipated, through the delay of his own poems, by the not dissimilar newness of his sister Christina, and of Swinburne. Their works made some aspects of his manner seem not so new, and at the same time not so likely to deter by entire unfamiliarity of tone.

William Morris.

A younger associate of Rossetti was William Morris, educated at Marlborough and Exeter College, Oxford. His Muse was "pre-Raphaelite" and mediaeval in his early prose stories in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine" (1856), and his later fictions, in the same archaic and fantastic manner (there were seven of them between 1889 and 1898), never could wholly recapture the magic of "The Hollow Land" of his undergraduate days. It is even the author\'s opinion that Morris never, in his voluminous later poetry, reached the same level of original effect as in several poems in his "Defence of Guenevere," published when his age was 24, in 1858. This opinion can scarcely be the result of "ossification of the intellect," which seldom sets in when the critic is an undergraduate, and is eagerly expecting a new poem from a favourite author. That poem, "The Life and Death of Jason" (1867), was, to some devotees of "The Defence of Guenevere," a disappointment. The vigour and melancholy of "The Haystack in the Floods," and "Sir Peter[Pg 600] Harpdon\'s End," and "The Sailing of the Sword," and the unanalysable magic of "The Blue Closet" and "The Wind," were not in "Jason," and could not be, and never will be anywhere again. In the earlier book the young poet had caught a rare element in mediaeval romance and song, a vague but poignant sense of colour and yearning and mystery, not to be defined in prose, and scarcely, except perhaps in "Sir Galahad," apprehended by Tennyson. We were carried again into such chambers as that wherein—

Beside the bed there was a stone
Corpus Christi written thereon;

or we were brought face to face with some forgotten tragedy of the Hundred Years\' War, and saw the true lovers and the parting that they had beside the haystack in the floods, such dull grey floods in a dull green land as Shelley saw in fact, and recognized with terror that he had seen before—in vision.

The new poem, "Jason," retold, with an approach to Chaucer\'s manner in versification and in mediaeval tone, the immortal pre-Homeric story of the adventure of the Fleece of Gold. The poem, in rhymed decasyllabic couplets, with songs interspersed, should be compared with the ancient poems on the subject, especially with the "Argonautica" of Apollonius Rhodius. Morris had succeeded in telling of the love of Medea and the adventures of the heroes, in the tone of romance, with "abundant fluency, distinctness, and distinction". He had already in hand many of the tales in "that ocean of the sea of stories," "The Earthly Paradise" in four volumes (1868-1870). Of the twenty-four tales half are from classical, half from romantic sources. To some readers the opening, the adventure of English voyagers of the time of Edward III., who find the Earthly Paradise, is more congenial, the heroes being men of this world, than the languor which seems to hang over the personages in the tales of Lotusland. The tales are more like work in tapestry than in painting; the manner tends to monotony; we need a wind from the wings of the Muse of Homer. Morris called himself "the idle singer of an empty day". No man was more industrious, not[Pg 601] only in his great poetic task, but in Icelandic studies,—hence the ringing anap?sts of his "Sigurd the Volsung"—in study of the arts of the Middle Ages; in manufacture and sale of objects of household decoration, and of furniture, in glass for church windows, and in printing. Coming into close touch with artisans and labourers, and being more and more impressed by the hideousness of their modern conditions of life, and by the contrasted mindless luxury of many of the rich, he founded a social democratic league, tersely described as meant "to blow the guts out of everybody". The beauty and happy ?sthetic simplicity of the society which is to follow after this initial process he described in "News from Nowhere," and he chanted for the toilers in "Poems by the Way". Not for the people, perhaps, in fact for few, he produced translations of the Volsunga Saga, combining the fragments from Icelandic prose and poetry about that glorious tragic fable; and also rendered the Saga of "Grettir the Strong" and others, into an English of his own, with archaicisms of various ages blended. His verse translation of "Beowulf" is obscure, owing to his effort to find living words in th............