Letters On Literature Of Modern English Poetry byLang, Andrew
My dear Wincott,--I hear that a book has lately been published by an
American lady, in which all the modern poets are represented. The
singers have been induced to make their own selections, and put
forward, as Mr. Browning says, their best foot, anapaest or trochee,
or whatever it may be. My information goes further, and declares
that there are but eighteen poets of England to sixty inspired
Americans.
This Western collection of modern minstrelsy shows how very
dangerous it is to write even on the English poetry of the day.
Eighteen is long odds against a single critic, and Major Bellenden,
in "Old Mortality," tells us that three to one are odds as long as
ever any warrior met victoriously, and that warrior was old Corporal
Raddlebanes.
I decline the task; I am not going to try to estimate either the
eighteen of England or the sixty of the States. It is enough to
speak about three living poets, in addition to those masters treated
of in my last letter. Two of the three you will have guessed at--
Mr. Swinburne and Mr. William Morris. The third, I dare say, you do
not know even by name. I think he is not one of the English
eighteen--Mr. Robert Bridges. His muse has followed the epicurean
maxim, and chosen the shadowy path, fallentis semita vitae, where
the dew lies longest on the grass, and the red rowan berries droop
in autumn above the yellow St. John's wort. But you will find her
all the fresher for her country ways.
My knowledge of Mr. William Morris's poetry begins in years so far
away that they seem like reminiscences of another existence. I
remember sitting beneath Cardinal Beaton's ruined castle at St.
Andrews, looking across the bay to the sunset, while some one
repeated "Two Red Roses across the Moon." And I remember thinking
that the poem was nonsense. With Mr. Morris's other early verses,
"The Defence of Guinevere," this song of the moon and the roses was
published in 1858. Probably the little book won no attention; it is
not popular even now. Yet the lyrics remain in memories which
forget all but a general impression of the vast "Earthly Paradise,"
that huge decorative poem, in which slim maidens and green-clad men,
and waters wan, and flowering apple trees, and rich palaces are all
mingled as on some long ancient tapestry, shaken a little by the
wind of death. They are not living and breathing people, these
persons of the fables; they are but shadows, beautiful and faint,
and their poem is fit reading for sleepy summer afternoons. But the
characters in the lyrics in "The Defence of Guinevere" are people of
flesh and blood, under their chain armour and their velvet, and the
trappings of their tabards.
There is no book in the world quite like this of Mr. Morris's old
Oxford days when the spirit of the Middle Ages entered into him,
with all its contradictions of faith and doubt, and its earnest
desire to enjoy this life to the full in war and love, or to make
certain of a future in which war is not, and all love is pure
heavenly. If one were to choose favourites from "The Defence of
Guinevere," they would be the ballads of "Shameful Death," and of
"The Sailing of the Sword," and "The Wind," which has the wind's
wail in its voice, and all the mad regret of "Porphyria's Lover" in
its burden.
The use of "colour-words," in all these pieces, is very curious and
happy. The red ruby, the brown falcon, the white maids, "the
scarlet roofs of the good town," in "The Sailing of the Sword," make
the poem a vivid picture. Then look at the mad, remorseful sea-
rover, the slayer of his lady, in "The Wind":
"For my chair is heavy and carved, and with sweeping green behind
It is hung, and the dragons thereon grin out in the gusts of the
wind;
On its folds an orange lies with a deep gash cut in the rind;
If I move my chair it will scream, and the orange will roll out far,
And the faint yellow juice ooze out like blood from a wizard's jar,
And the dogs will howl for those who went last month the war."
"The Blue Closet," which is said to have been written for some
drawings of Mr. Rossetti, is also a masterpiece in this romantic
manner. Our brief English age of romanticism, our 1830, was 1856-
60, when Mr. Morris, Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburne were
undergraduates. Perhaps it wants a peculiar turn of taste to admire
these strange things, though "The Haystack in the Floods," with its
tragedy, must surely appeal to all who read poetry.
For the rest, as time goes on, I more and more feel as if Mr.
Morris's long later poems, "The Earthly Paradise" especially, were
less art than "art manufacture." This may be an ungrateful and
erroneous sentiment. "The Earthly Paradise," and still more
certainly "Jason," are full of such pleasure as only poetry can
give. As some one said of a contemporary politician, they are
"good, but copious." Even from narrative poetry Mr. Morris has long
abstained. He, too, illustrates Mr. Matthew Arnold's parable of
"The Progress of Poetry."
"The Mount is mute, the channel dry."
Euripides has been called "the meteoric poet," and the same title
seems very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few readers had
heard his name--I only knew it as that of the author of a strange
mediaeval tale in prose--when he published "Atalanta in Calydon" in
1865. I remember taking up the quarto in white cloth, at the Oxford
Union, and being instantly led captive by the beauty and originality
of the verse.
There was this novel "meteoric" character in the poem: the writer
seemed to rejoice in snow and fire, and stars, and storm, "the blue
cold fields and folds of air," in all the primitive forces which
were alive before this earth was; the naked vast powers that circle
the planets and farthest constellations. This quality, and his
varied and sonorous verse, and his pessimism, put into the mouth of
a Greek chorus, were the things that struck one most in Mr.
Swinburne. He was, above all, "a mighty-mouthed inventer of
harmonies," and one looked eagerly for his next poems. They came
with disappointment and trouble.
The famous "Poems and Ballads" have become so well known that people
can hardly understand the noise they made. I don't wonder at the
scandal, even now. I don't see the fun of several of the pieces,
except the mischievous fun of shocking your audience. However, "The
Leper" and his company are chiefly boyish, in the least favourable
sense of the word. They do not destroy the imperishable merit of
the "Hymn to Proserpine" and the "Garden of Proserpine" and the
"Triumph of Time" and "Itylus."
Many years have passed since 1866, and yet one's old opinion, that
English poetry contains no verbal music more original, sonorous, and
sweet than Mr. Swinburne wrote in these pieces when still very
young, remains an opinion unshaken. Twenty years ago, then, he had
enabled the world to take his measure; he had given proofs of a true
poet; he was learned too in literature as few poets have been since
Milton, and, like Milton, skilled to make verse in the languages of
the ancient world and in modern tongues. His French songs and Greek
elegiacs are of great excellence; probably no scholar who was not
also a poet could match his Greek lines on Landor.
What, then, is lacking to make Mr. Swinburne a poet of a rank even
higher than that which he occupies? Who can tell? There is no
science that can master this chemistry of the brain. He is too
copious. "Bothwell" is long enough for six plays, and "Tristram of
Lyonesse" is prolix beyond even mediaeval narrative. He is too
pertinacious; children are the joy of the world and Victor Hugo is a
great poet; but Mr. Swinburne almost makes us excuse Herod and
Napoleon III. by his endless odes to Hugo, and rondels to small boys
and girls. Ne quid nimis, that is the golden rule which he
constantly spurns, being too luxuriant, too emphatic, and as fond of
repeating himself as Professor Freeman. Such are the defects of so
noble a genius; thus perverse Nature has decided that it shall be,
Nature which makes no ruby without a flaw.
The name of Mr. Robert Bridges is probably strange to many lovers of
poetry who would like nothing better than to make acquaintance with
his verse. But his verse is not so easily found. This poet never
writes in magazines; his books have not appealed to the public by
any sort of advertisement, only two or three of them have come forth
in the regular way. The first was "Poems, by Robert Bridges,
Batchelor of Arts in the University of Oxford. Parva seges satis
est. London: Pickering, 1873."
This volume was presently, I fancy, withdrawn, and the author has
distributed some portions of it in succeeding pamphlets, or in books
printed at Mr. Daniel's private press in Oxford. In these, as in
all Mr. Bridges's poems, there is a certain austere and indifferent
beauty of diction and a memory of the old English poets, Milton and
the earlier lyrists. I remember being greatly pleased with the
"Elegy on a Lady whom Grief for the Death of Her Betrothed Killed."
"Let the priests go before, arrayed in white,
And let the dark-stoled minstrels follow slow
Next they that bear her, honoured on this night,
And then the maidens in a double row,
Each singing soft and low,
And each on high a torch upstaying:
Unto her lover lead her forth with light,
With music and with singing, and with praying."
This is a stately stanza.
In his first volume Mr. Bridges offered a few rondeaux and triolets,
turning his back on all these things as soon as they became popular.
In spite of their popularity I have the audacity to like them still,
in their humble twittering way. Much more in his true vein were the
lines, "Clear and Gentle Stream," and all the other verses in which,
like a true Etonian, he celebrates the beautiful Thames:
"There is a hill beside the silver Thames,
Shady with birch and beech and odorous pine,
And brilliant under foot with thousand gems
Steeply the thickets to his floods decline.
Straight trees in every place
Their thick tops interlace,
And pendent branches trail their foliage fine
Upon his watery face.
* * *
A reedy island guards the sacred bower
And hides it from the meadow, where in peace
The lazy cows wrench many a scented flower,
Robbing the golden market of the bees.
And laden branches float
By banks of myosote;
And scented flag and golden fleur-de-lys
Delay the loitering boat."
I cannot say how often I have read that poem, and how delightfully
it carries the breath of our River through the London smoke. Nor
less welcome are the two poems on spring, the "Invitation to the
Country," and the "Reply." In these, besides their verbal beauty
and their charming pictures, is a manly philosophy of Life, which
animates Mr. Bridges's more important pieces--his "Prometheus the
Firebringer," and his "Nero," a tragedy remarkable for the
representation of Nero himself, the luxurious human tiger. From
"Prometheus" I make a short extract, to show the quality of Mr.
Bridges's blank verse:
"Nor is there any spirit on earth astir,
Nor 'neath the airy vault, nor yet beyond
In any dweller in far-reaching space
Nobler or dearer than the spirit of man:
That spirit which lives in each and will not die,
That wooeth beauty, and for all good things
Urgeth a voice, or still in passion sigheth,
And where he loveth, draweth the heart with him."
Mr. Bridges's latest book is his "Eros and Psyche" (Bell & Sons, who
publish the "Prometheus"). It is the old story very closely
followed, and beautifully retold, with a hundred memories of ancient
poets: Homer, Dante, Theocritus, as well as of Apuleius.
I have named Mr. Bridges here because his poems are probably all but
unknown to readers well acquainted with many other English writers
of late days. On them, especially on actual contemporaries or
juniors in age, it would be almost impertinent for me to speak to
you; but, even at that risk, I take the chance of directing you to
the poetry of Mr. Bridges. I owe so much pleasure to its delicate
air, that, if speech be impertinence, silence were ingratitude. {1}
{1} Since this was written, Mr. Bridges has made his lyrics
accessible in "Shorter Poems." (G. Bell and Sons: 1890)