George Brimley.

I hardly know a book more interesting to the real student of real criticism than George Brimley’s Essays.[[944]] That it gives us, with Matthew Arnold’s earliest work, the first courses of the new temple of English Criticism is something, but its intrinsic attraction is its chief. The writer was apparently able to devote his short but not unhappy life, without let or hindrance other than that of feeble health, to literature; he was unhampered by any distracting desire to create; he could judge and enjoy with that almost uncanny calmness which often results, in happy dispositions, from the beneficent effect of the mal physique, freed from the aggravation of the mal moral.[[945]] He has idols; but he breaks away from them, if he does not quite break them. He puts no others in their places, as Arnold did too often: and, like Dryden (though they had no other point of resemblance than in both being admirable critics, and both members of Trinity College, Cambridge), he never goes wrong without coming right, with a force and vehemence of leap only intensified by his recoil. In his best work, what should be the famous, and is, to those who know it, the delightful, Essay on Tennyson, we have a thing profitable at once for example, for reproof, and for instruction, as few critical things are.

His Essay on Tennyson.

We find him at the opening a little joined to one idol, that apparently respectable, but infinitely false, god, the belief that the poet must somehow or other deal with modern life.[[946]] Even from this point of view he will not give up Tennyson, but he apologises for him, and he colours nearly all his remarks on at least the early Poems by the apologies. He cannot shake himself quite free. He sees the beauty of Claribel: but he will not allow its beauty to be its sole duty. It “is not quite certain what the precise feeling of it is,” and “no poem ought to admit of such a doubt.” No music of verse, no pictorial power, “will enable a reader to care for such ‘creatures of the fancy’” as Margaret or Eleanore, as the Sea Fairies, and many others. “If expression were the highest aim of poetry,” Mariana would be consummate: but—--! Mr Tennyson “moved in the centre of the most distinguished young men of the University,” “yet his poems present faint evidences of this,” strange to say! The Miller’s Daughter, and The Gardener’s Daughter, and The May Queen are dwelt on at great length, and with an evident feeling that here is something you can recommend to a practical friend who cannot embrace day-dreams. Mariana in the South should “connect itself more clearly with a person brought before the mind”—with a certificate of birth, let us say, and something about her parentage, and the bad man who left her, and the price of beans and garlic in the next village. The Lady of Shalott “eliminates all human interest.” Fatima, justly admired, “has neither beginning, middle, or end.” The Palace of Art has “no adequate dramatic presentation of the mode in which the great law of humanity works out its processes in the soul.” [So lyric poets, we understand, are not entitled to speak lyrically: but must write drama!] And, greatest shock of all, The Dream of Fair Women is not so much as mentioned. When Brimley wrote it had long shaken off its earlier crudities,—had attained its final symmetry. It was there, entire and perfect, from the exquisite opening, through the matchless blended shiftings of life and literature, woven into one passionate whole, to those last two stanzas which give the motto of Life itself from youth to age, the raison d'être of Heaven, the undying sting of Hell, the secret of the peace that grows on the soul through Purgatory. And the critic says nothing about it!

Yet he has justified his instinct—if not quite his cleared vision—from the first. Of Claribel itself, of the Marianas, of The Lotos-Eaters, of the Palace, he has given analytic appreciations so enthusiastic, and at the same time so just, so solidly thought, and so delicately phrased, that there is nothing like them in Mr Arnold (who was rather grudging of such things), and nothing superior to them anywhere.

There is a priceless wavering, a soul-saving “suppose it were true?” in that “If” (most virtuous of its kind!),—“If expression were the highest aim of poetry,” nor do I think it fanciful to see in the blasphemy about music and painting not saving “creatures of the fancy,” a vain protest against the conviction that they do. Where he can get his prejudice and his judgment to run in couples—as in regard to Locksley Hall—the car sweeps triumphantly from start to finish, out of all danger from the turning pillar. When he comes to Maud (which the folk who had the prejudice, but not the judgment, were blaspheming at the very moment at which he wrote), he turns on them with a vehemence almost inconsistent—but with the blessed inconsistency which is permissible—and lays it down plump and plain, that “it is well not to be frightened out of the enjoyment of fine poetry ... by such epithets as morbid, hysterical, spasmodic.” Most true, and it would be still better to add “beginning,” “middle,” “end,” “not human,” the neglect of acquaintance with the most distinguished young men of the university, the absence of dramatic presentation, and the rest of them, to the herd of bogies that should first be left to animate swine, and then be driven into the deep. Once, indeed, afterwards he half relapses, observing that there is “incongruity” in The Princess. But his nerves have grown firmer from his long bath of pure poetry, and he agrees to make the best of it.

His other work.