Richard Harris Barham

(1788-1845).

Richard Harris Barham represents a type of humour much broader than that of Praed. His Ingoldsby Legends have enjoyed a popularity wider, probably, than that of any other humorous verse of the century. They are clever, rapid in narrative, and resourceful in phrase and in rhyme. Yet a certain want of delicacy in the wit and of melody in the verse is evident when we compare them with the work of Hood and Praed, or that of such later humorists as Calverley, or J. K. Stephen, or Lewis Carroll. Barham’s last composition, ‘As I laye a-thynkynge,’ contains the promise of success if he had written serious poetry.

Hartley Coleridge

(1796-1849).

Hartley Coleridge was a poet of a totally different type; and we must ascribe the fact that he never redeemed his early promise to hereditary weakness of will rather than to any adverse influence of the time. Against the latter he had a defence that did not in the same measure shield any other contemporary. He was the special inheritor of the great traditions of the so-called Lake school; and he was cradled in poetry. His infancy and childhood are celebrated both by his father and by Wordsworth. Derwent Coleridge tells a story of his brother, which shows that Wordsworth accurately described Hartley as one ‘whose fancies from afar are brought,’ and who made ‘a mock apparel’ of his words. ‘Hartley, when about five years old, was asked a question about himself being called Hartley. “Which Hartley?” asked the boy. “Why! is there more than one Hartley?” “Yes,” he replied, “there’s a deal of Hartleys.” “How so?” “There’s Picture-Hartley (Hazlitt had painted a portrait of him) and Shadow-Hartley, and there’s Echo-Hartley, and there’s Catch-me-fast Hartley”; at the same time seizing his own arm very eagerly.’ Evidently this boy lived in a world of day-dreams, in a ‘perpetual perspective.’ The problem of the education of such a young idealist is a difficult one; but it seems clear that its principle ought to have been a judicious, not a harsh or pedantic, regularity. His father’s aspiration of ‘wandering like a breeze’ was not for him. But instead, Hartley’s actual education was irregular and desultory. Nothing was done to improve his natural defect and to discipline his will; and weakness of will wrecked his life. The fellowship he had won at Oriel College was forfeited for intemperance, and he never conquered the habit, but sank from depth to depth, a pitiable example of genius gone to waste.

Though Hartley Coleridge wrote prose as well, his name is now associated only with his poems. A volume of these was published in 1833. It was marked Vol. I., but no second ever appeared. The poems however were re-edited, with additions, by Derwent Coleridge, in 1851. Hartley Coleridge nowhere shows the supreme poetic gift his father possessed; but as in sheer genius the elder Coleridge was probably superior to any contemporary, so Hartley seems to have been the superior by endowment of any poet then writing, Tennyson and Browning alone excepted. Weakness of will, unfortunately, doomed him to excel only in short pieces, and to be far from uniform in these. It would have been wiser to omit the section of ‘playful and humorous’ pieces. But the sonnets are very good, and some of them are excellent. A few of the songs take an equally high rank, especially the well-known She is not fair to outward view, and ’Tis sweet to hear the merry lark. There are many suggestions of Wordsworth, but Hartley Coleridge is not an imitative poet. Without any striking originality he is fresh and independent. His verse betrays a gentle and kindly as well as a sensitive character. He evidently felt affection for all living things, and especially for all that was weak, whether from nature, age, or circumstance. Some of this feeling turns back, as it were, upon himself, in the numerous and often pathetic poems in which he appears to be contemplating his own history. He is of the school of Wordsworth in his love for and his familiar communion with nature; and here at least he gathered some fruit 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.