CHAPTER III

THE MINOR POETS, 1830 to 1850

The view presented in the last chapter is that even Tennyson in his early works displays the qualities to be expected in a time of lowered energy, and gradually, by native force, rises superior to its limits. If this view be sound we should expect the characteristics in question to be much more prominent in lesser men. And this we find to be the case. Besides Tennyson himself and his brothers, the principal poets who had begun to write before 1830, and who may be taken as representative of the early years of the period, were: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mrs. Hemans, Elizabeth Moulton Barrett, Thomas Hood, Henry Taylor, and William Motherwell. We may include also Winthrop Mackworth Praed, for, though his poems were not collected and published till long afterwards, a number of them were written before this date. The Poems of Hartley Coleridge came a little later; and in the last year of the decade then beginning Philip James Bailey won by the long and ambitious poem of Festus, a great reputation which has for many years been fading away.

These writers are unusually hard to classify, because of the absence of any dominant note or of any absorbing interest. The two women first named, Mrs. Hemans and ‘L. E. L.,’ belong rather to the preceding period, though they overlap this. Both are sentimentalists, and time has taken from their work the charm it once possessed. Mrs. Hemans is now unduly depreciated, but the difference between the most favourable and the least favourable critic can only be with regard to the degree of weakness charged against her. L. E. Landon (1802-1838), who became by marriage Mrs. Maclean, was in her own day even more popular than Mrs. Hemans, but she has since been much more completely forgotten. Even the mystery of her death, which was believed by many to be due to foul play, but which in all probability occurred through misadventure, has failed to keep alive the interest in her. Yet, though her verse is of little value, she is one of the best examples of the tendencies of the time. She followed Byron as far as her talents and the restraints of her sex would allow. Her longer poems are on the whole poor; some of her shorter pieces are very readable, but they are chargeable with the fault of an excess of rhetoric. Such as she was in poetry, her work was mostly done before 1830. After that date she wrote some mediocre prose stories, but was comparatively inactive in verse.

Charles Tennyson Turner

(1808-1879).

Both of Tennyson’s brothers, Charles and Frederick, were, like himself, poets. It has but recently become known that Frederick as well as Charles had a share in the Poems by Two Brothers. Except for this the eldest brother’s publications were of much later date; but Charles Tennyson, afterwards Charles Tennyson Turner, followed up the joint venture with another of his own, a slim volume of Sonnets and Fugitive Pieces, published in 1830. This attracted the attention of Coleridge, who bestowed warm but discriminating praise upon the sonnets. Both as to fame, and probably as to his own productiveness, Charles Tennyson Turner was crushed, as it were, under his greater brother. He wrote little more, though he carefully revised and in some respects decidedly improved his sonnets. It is by virtue of them that he takes his place among English poets. They are graceful and sweet, but the substance is not always worthy of the form. They reveal everywhere the interests and the pursuits of the Vicar of Grasby, and they are honourable to his peaceful piety. It is evident that both Charles and Frederick Tennyson, and especially the latter, might have been disposed to adapt to themselves the humorous complaint of the second Duke of Wellington, and exclaim, ‘What can a man do with such a brother?’ Though the eldest of the three, Mr. Frederick Tennyson belongs by the date of his publications rather to the period after than to the period before 1870.

Of the other writers, Praed, accomplished and exceedingly clever, but never impelled to do anything really great, may be regarded as a victim of the prevalent want of purpose. So may Hood, in respect of that section of his works which naturally goes along with those of Praed. Hood, it is true, was too great a man to be dismissed as merely a writer of the transition; yet, just because of his greatness, his history shows better than that of any other man how earnestness was discouraged and triviality fostered. Seldom have so great poetic gifts been so squandered—with no dishonour to Hood—on mere puns. The poet, as an early critic pointed out, was a man of essentially serious mind; but he had to earn bread for himself and his children, and as jesting paid, while serious poetry did not, he was compelled to jest.

Thomas Hood

(1799-1845).

Thomas Hood inherited from a consumptive family a feeble constitution, and the latter part of his life was a gallant but painful struggle against disease. His literary life began in 1821, when he was made ‘a sort of sub-editor’ of the London Magazine. Lycus the Centaur, a boldly imaginative piece for so young a man, appeared in 1822. The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, a fine specimen of graceful fancy deservedly ranked high by himself, and the powerful and terrible Eugene Aram’s Dream, were likewise early pieces. The latter may be contrasted for its treatment of crime with Bulwer Lytton’s well-known novel on the story of the same murderer. The advantage in imaginative force and insight, as well as in moral wholesomeness, is all on the side of Hood.

These pieces prove that the vein of serious poetry was present from the first in Hood. The vein of jest and pun was equally natural to him. Jokes of all kinds, practical and other, enlivened and sometimes distracted his own household. This liking for fun inspired the Odes and Addresses to Great People, written in conjunction with John Hamilton Reynolds, the Whims and Oddities, and the succession of Comic Annuals, the first of which appeared in 1830. The presence of such a light and playful element in a great man’s work is by no means to be regretted; but in Hood’s case, unfortunately, there was for many years little else. Hood was blameless, for he had to live. With characteristic modesty he seems for a time to have been persuaded that the public were right, and that nature meant him for a professional jester. It was fortunate that he lived to change this opinion, for much of his finest poetry belongs to his closing years.

Perhaps the most original fruit of Hood’s genius is Miss Kilmansegg, which conceals under a grotesque exterior deep feeling and effective satire. It has been sometimes ranked as Hood’s greatest work; and if comparison be made with his longer pieces only, or if we look principally to the uniqueness of the poem, the judgment will hardly be disputed; but probably the popular instinct which has seized upon The Song of the Shirt and The Bridge of Sighs, and the criticism which exalts The Haunted House, are in this instance sounder. The grotesque element cannot be employed freely without damage to the pure poetic beauty of the piece in which it occurs; and Miss Kilmansegg certainly does suffer such damage.

The Song of the Shirt and The Bridge of Sighs are by far the most popular of Hood’s poems. They have the great merit of perfect truth of feeling. Handling subjects which tempt to sentiment, and even to that excess of sentiment known in the language of slang as ‘gush,’ they are wholly free from anything false or weak or merely lachrymose. Pity makes the verse, but it is the pity of a manly man. The Haunted House, first published in the opening number of Hood’s Magazine, stands at the head of the writer’s poetry of pure imagination. Few pieces can rival it for eeriness of impression, and few exhibit such delicate skill in the choice of details in description. The centipede, the spider, the maggots, the emmets, the bats, the rusty armour and the tattered flags, all help to deepen the sense of desolation and decay. This piece, with the more serious ones already mentioned, and a few others, such as Ruth and The Death-Bed, are Hood’s best title to fame. The growth in their relative number as time went on, the increasing wealth of imagination and the greater flexibility of verse, all show that Hood was to the end a progressive poet. If he had lived longer and enjoyed better health his fame might have been very great. He was the victim of the transition, and through tardiness of recognition and the want of any influence to draw him out, he failed to leave a sufficient body of pure and great poetry to sustain permanently a high reputation. As the author of a few pieces with the unmistakable note of poetry he can never be quite forgotten.

Laman Blanchard

(1804-1845).

Passing mention may be accorded along with Hood to Laman Blanchard, a very minor poet, who showed the same combination of seriousness with fun. He was an agreeable writer, but not, even at his best, a distinguished one.

Winthrop Mackworth Praed

(1802-1839).

The man of closest affinity to Hood was Winthrop Mackworth Praed, who began by contributing at school to The Etonian, and continued at Cambridge to write for Knight’s Quarterly Magazine. He entered Parliament, and if he had lived he would probably have risen to eminence there. Praed belongs to the class of writers of vers de société of which Prior is the earlier and Locker-Lampson the later master; and it is not too much to say that he surpasses both. It is a species of verse well adapted to such a period as that in which Praed lived. Great earnestness is not required, and is even fatal to it. The qualities essential to success are culture, good-breeding, wit and lightness of touch. Praed had them all. The cleverness and wit and delicacy which nature had given him were all increased by the influence of his school and university, where he acquired all the grace of scholarship without any of the ponderosity of learning. But Praed had one more gift, without which his verses must have taken a lower place—the gift of a refined poetic fancy. It is this that gives his wit its special charm, and it is this too that saves his verse from being that merely of a very clever and refined jester. The well-known character of The Vicar is one of the best examples of this combination of feeling with lightness. Herein we detect the difference between Praed’s wit and the wit of Hood. The latter commonly separated jest from earnest, and gave himself wholly over to one or the other. He is far the more pronounced punster. The pleasant surprises of Praed’s verse usually arise from some delicate turn of thought rather than from a twisting of words. Hood’s fun is sometimes almost boisterous, Praed’s is never so. As regards the lighter verse, the advantage on comparison is all on the side of the younger man. But there is no other aspect to Praed. Notwithstanding the undertone of seriousness, notwithstanding too the strange power of that masterpiece of the grotesque, The Red Fisherman, it remains doubtful whether he had the capacity to be more than what he is, the prince of elegant and refined writers of light verse. Hood is indubitably a poet.

Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton

(1809-1885).

It is likewise as a writer of vers de société that Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, is best known, and is happiest. But though he shines as a writer of what may be called, without disparagement, poetical trifles, there is also a serious strain by no means contemptible in his verse. Strangers Yet is a fine specimen of pathos. In Poems, Legendary and Historical, however, Houghton is less successful, and the best of them do not bear comparison with Aytoun’s Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, which belong to the same class. Houghton’s critical work in prose is on the whole more valuable than his verse, for there his culture told, and the lack of high imagination is less felt.