The Age of Tennyson. Hugh Walker
from the ‘unchartered freedom’ of his existence.
Sara Coleridge
(1802-1852).
Hartley Coleridge belonged to a family unique in its power of transmitting genius. His sister Sara likewise inherited intellectual and imaginative gifts probably little if at all inferior to his; but circumstances prevented her from making a great name. She married another Coleridge of genius, her cousin, Henry Nelson, whose untimely death threw a burden upon her, as editor of her father’s literary remains, that absorbed her time and energies. Her only book is Phantasmion, a fairy tale, whose lyric snatches prove her worthy of remembrance among English poetesses.
William Motherwell
(1797-1835).
Of the other poets who have been named, William Motherwell was the least considerable both in achievement and in gifts. He had a taste for research in old popular poetry, but he took such liberties that his versions are not to be trusted. He also allowed the pseudo-antique to mar some of his own work, especially the fine Cavalier Song. He is happiest in the vein of pathetic Scotch verse, of which the best specimen he left is his Jeanie Morison. He had the feeling and sensibility of a minor Burns, but not the force. Contemporary with Motherwell and, on the Scotch side of his work, not dissimilar, was William Thom (1798-1848), ‘the weaver poet,’ best known for The Blind Boy’s Pranks. Dialect alone unites with these two George Outram (1805-1856) a man little known out of Scotland, but, in his best pieces, one of the most irresistibly humorous of comic poets. Nothing but unfamiliarity with the legal processes and phrases on which the wit frequently turns, prevents him from being widely popular. For rich fun The Annuity, his masterpiece, has seldom been surpassed.
Henry Taylor
(1800-1886).
Henry Taylor lifts us once more into a higher sphere of art. He lived an even and unruffled life, the spirit of which seems to have passed into his works. The son of a country gentleman, he procured an appointment in the Colonial office, gradually rose in it, was knighted, and after nearly half a century of service, retired in 1872. The comfortable and easy life of office permitted Taylor to develop his powers to the uttermost. For a greater man its very smoothness might have been damaging. Great poetry requires passion: either the passion of the emotional nature, or that passion of thought which, as Mr. William Watson has lately reminded the world, is no less valuable for the purposes of art. Official life fosters neither; but it would seem that Sir Henry Taylor’s nature contained the germ of neither. Hence perhaps, in part, his disapproval of the school of Byron. His practice would have been as excellent as his theory had he been one of those who know
‘A deeper transport and a mightier thrill
Than comes of commerce with mortality.’
But he was wanting in the second kind of passion, as well as in the first. His work is like his life, smooth, calm, unchargeable with faults; but it is not the kind that animates mankind.
Sir Henry Taylor wrote prose as well as verse, in particular a very readable autobiography. It is however chiefly as a dramatist that he is memorable. His plays are the closet studies of a cultured man of letters, who knew little and cared little about the conditions of the stage. Isaac Comnenus (1827) was followed by his masterpiece, Philip Van Artevelde (1834). Edwin the Fair appeared in 1842, and his last play, St. Clement’s Eve, in 1862. He also wrote one other piece, A Sicilian Summer, a kind of comedy, not very successful.
Philip Van Artevelde is so clearly Taylor’s best work that his literary faculty may be judged, certainly without danger of depreciation, from it alone. It is a historical drama, and the title sufficiently indicates the age and country in which the scene is laid. The whole drama is long, and the slow movement adapts it rather for reading than for representation. It is composed of two parts, separated by The Lay of Elena, a lyrical piece in which may be detected echoes both of Wordsworth and Coleridge, with an occasional suggestion of Scott. The weakest element of the drama is the treatment of passion. Taylor’s incapacity to comprehend it is strikingly illustrated in the passage where Philip, immediately after his declaration of love to Elena, reflects upon the caprice of a woman’s fancy which
‘Takes no distinction but of sex,
And ridicules the very name of choice.’
The thought is a little trite, and the words are extraordinary in the mouth of a newly-accepted lover. We may confidently look to Taylor for careful and workmanlike delineation of character, but we shall find in him no profound insight. Philip proses about the burden he takes up and the cares he endures. But notwithstanding defects, the interest is fairly well sustained, some of the situations are impressive, and the verse is frequently lit with flashes of imaginative power. A man of talent with a touch of genius, Taylor saw clearly what the poetry of his time needed, but for want of the ‘passion of thought’ he failed to supply it.
Philip James Bailey
(1816-1902).
One contemporary at least showed by his practice that he agreed with Taylor as to the necessity of setting poetry on a philosophical basis. Philip James Bailey published Festus in 1839. It has been the work of his life, for though he wrote other pieces afterwards, most of them have been incorporated, wholly or in part, with Festus. The consequence is that the poem, long originally, has grown to enormous dimensions. It is an ambitious attempt to settle all the fundamental problems of the universe, and it was once hailed with a chorus of praise that would almost have sufficed for Homer or Milton. This praise remains one of the curiosities of criticism for later days to marvel at. Festus is not profound philosophy, and still less is it true poetry. The thought when probed is commonplace. A vigorous expression here and there is hardly enough to redeem the weak echoes of Goethe and Byron. Frequently the verse is distinguishable from prose only by the manner of printing. ‘Swearers and swaggerers jeer at my name’ is supposed to be an iambic line. We are told that a thing is in our ‘soul-blood’ and our ‘soul-bones;’ and we hear of ‘marmoreal floods’ that ‘spread their couch of perdurable snow.’ Yet this passes for poetry, and Festus has gone through many editions in this country, and still more in America. The aberration of taste is not quite as great as that which raised Martin Farquhar Tupper and his Proverbial Philosophy to the highest popularity, but it is similar in kind.
Richard Hengist Horne
(1803-1884).
A more interesting and far superior example of the class of thoughtful poets was Richard Henry, or, as he called himself in later life, Richard Hengist Horne. Horne was a man of versatile talent who, after an adventurous youth in which he saw something of warfare and passed through many adventures on the coasts of America and, at a later date, in the Australian bush, settled down to a literary life. His first memorable works were two tragedies, Cosmo de’ Medici and The Death of Marlowe, both published in the year 1837. A third tragedy, Gregory VII., appeared in 1840. Horne’s dramas are thoughtful, and they have the vigour which marked his own character. Yet Horne seems to have felt that there was something not wholly satisfactory in his dramatic work, and, except Judas Iscariot (1848), his more noteworthy writings in later days are either prose, or lyrical verse, or epic blank verse. He is best known by Orion, an Epic Poem (1843). It is an epic with a philosophic groundwork, ‘intended,’ as the author himself explains, ‘to work out a special design, applicable to all time, by means of antique or classical imagery and associations.... Orion, the hero of my fable, is meant to present a type of the struggle of man with himself, i.e., the contest between the intellect and the senses.’ Horne sarcastically hinted his sense of the improbability that such a poem would find a sale by publishing the first three editions at a farthing, with the explanation that he did so ‘to avoid the trouble and greatly additional expense of forwarding presentation copies.’
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте