But it would argue gross unfairness in an advocate, and gross incompetence in a critic, to let it be supposed that these popular attractions were the only ones that Mrs. Browning possessed. Despite and besides the faults which will be presently noticed, and which, critically speaking, are very grave faults, she had poetical merits of a very high order. Her metrical faculty, though constantly flawed and imperfect, was very original and full of musical variety. Although her choice of words could by no means always be commended, her supply of them was extraordinary. Before her imprisonment in sick-rooms she had pored on nature with the eagerest and most observant eye, and that imprisonment itself only deepened the intensity of her remembered nature-worship. Her pathos, if it sometimes over-flowed into gush, was quite unquestionable in sincerity and most powerful in appeal; her sentiment was always pure and generous; and it is most curious to see how in the noble directness of such a piece as "Lord Walter's Wife," not only her little faults of sensiblerie, but her errors of diction, are burnt and smelted out by the fire of the expressed impression. Her verse-pictures—for instance those in the "Vision of Poets"—vie, in beauty if not in clearness of composition and definition, with Tennyson's own. The Romantic pieces already glanced at, obnoxious and obvious as are their defects, unite the pathos and the picturesqueness just assigned to her in a most remarkable manner. And when, especially in the Sonnet, she consented to undergo the limitations of a form which almost automatically restrained her voluble facility, the effect was often simply of the first order. The exquisite "Sonnets from the Portuguese" (which are not from the Portuguese, and are understood to have been addressed to Mr. Browning), especially that glorious one beginning—
If thou wilt love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only—
(which is not far below Shakespeare's or the great thing which was published as Drayton's), rank with the noblest efforts of the 16th-17th century in this exquisite form. And if this, instead of having to conform to the requirements of a connected history, were a separate study of Mrs. Browning, it would be necessary to mention scores of separate pieces full of varied beauty.
But in no poet, perhaps not even in Byron, are such great beauties associated with such astonishing defects as in Mrs. Browning; some of these defects being so disgusting as well as so strange that it requires not a little critical detachment to put her, on the whole, as high as she deserves to be put. Like almost all women who have written, she was extremely deficient in self-criticism, and positively pampered and abused her natural tendency towards fluent volubility. There is hardly one of the pieces named above, outside the sonnets, with the exception certainly of "Lord Walter's Wife" and possibly of "Cowper's Grave," which would not be immensely improved by compression and curtailment, "The Rhyme of the Duchess May" being a special example. In other pieces not yet specified, such as "The Romaunt of Margret," "Bianca among the Nightingales," and especially "The Poet's Vow," the same defect is painfully felt. That the poetess frequently, and especially in her later poetical work, touches subjects which she does not very well comprehend, and which are very doubtfully suited for poetical treatment at all, is a less important because a more controversial objection; and the merits of such a book as Aurora Leigh depend so much upon the arguing out of the general question whether what is practically a modern novel has any business to be written in verse, that they perhaps can receive no adequate treatment here. But as to the fatal fluency of Mrs. Browning there can be no question before any tribunal which knows its own jurisdiction and its own code. And that fluency extends to more than length. The vocabulary is wilfully and tastelessly unusual,—"abele" rhymed "abeel" for "poplar"; American forms such as "human" for "humanity" and "weaken" for a neuter verb; fustianish words like "reboant"; awkward suggestions of phrase, such as "droppings of warm tears."
But all these things, and others put together, are not so fatal as her extraordinary dulness of ear in the matter of rhyme. She endeavoured to defend her practice in this respect in the correspondence with Horne, but it is absolutely indefensible. What is known as assonance, that is to say, vowel rhyme only, as in Old French and in Spanish, is not in itself objectionable, though it is questionably suited to English. But Mrs. Browning's eccentricities do not as a rule, though they sometimes do, lie in the direction of assonance. They are simply bad and vulgar rhymes—rhymes which set the teeth on edge. Thus, when she rhymes "palace" and "chalice," "evermore" and "emperor," "Onora" and "o'er her," or, most appalling of all, "mountain" and "daunting," it is impossible not to remember with a shudder that every omnibus conductor does shout "Pallis," that the common Cockney would pronounce it "Onorer," that the vulgar ear is deaf to the difference between ore and or, and that it is possible to find persons not always of the costermonger class who would make of "mountain" something very like "mauunting." In other words, Mrs. Browning deliberately, or lazily, or for want of ear, admits false pronunciation to save her the trouble of an exact rhyme. Nay, more, despite her Greek, she will rhyme "idyll" to "middle," and "pyramidal" to "idle," though nothing can be longer than the i in the first case, and nothing shorter than the i in the second. The positive anguish which such hideous false notes as these must cause to any one with a delicate ear, the maddening interruption to the delight of these really beautiful pieces of poetry, cannot be over-estimated. It is fair to say that among the later fruit of her poetical tree there are fewer of these Dead Sea apples,—her husband, who, though audacious, was not vulgar in his rhymes, may have taught her better. But to her earlier, more spontaneous, and more characteristic verse they are a most terrible drawback, such as no other English poet exhibits or suffers.
No poets at all approaching the first class can be said to have been born within a decade either way of Tennyson and Browning, though some extremely interesting writers of verse of about the same date will have to be noticed in the latter part of this chapter. The next year that produced a poet almost if not quite great, though one of odd lapses and limitations, was 1822, the birth-year of Matthew Arnold. When a writer has produced both prose and verse, or prose of distinctly different kinds in which one division or kind was very far superior in intrinsic value and extrinsic importance to the others, it has seemed best here to notice all his work together. But in the case of Mr. Arnold, as in some others, this is not possible, the volume, the character, and the influence of his work in creative verse and critical prose alike demanding separate treatment for the two sections. He was the eldest son of Dr. Arnold, the famous head-master of Rugby, and was educated first at the two schools, Winchester and Rugby itself, with which his father was connected as scholar and master, and then at Balliol, where he obtained a scholarship in 1840. He took the Newdigate in 1844, and was elected a fellow of Oriel in 1845. After some work as private secretary, he received an inspectorship of schools, and held it until nearly the time of his death in 1888. He had been Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1857-67. He published poetry early, and though his fame at this time was never very wide, he was known to those interested in poetry, and especially to Oxford men, for more than twenty years before he acquired popularity as a critic and began the remarkable series of prose works which will be noticed in a later chapter. So early as 1849 he had published, under the initial of his surname only, The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems; but his poetical building was not securely founded until 1853, when there appeared, with a very remarkable preface, a collection of Poems, which was certainly the best thing that had been produced by any one younger than the two masters already discussed. Merope, which followed in 1858, was an attempt at an English-Greek drama, which, with Mr. Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon and Erechtheus, is perhaps the best of a somewhat mistaken kind, for Shelley's Prometheus Unbound soars far above the kind itself. Official duty first, and the growing vogue of his prose writing later, prevented Mr. Arnold from issuing very many volumes of verse. But his New Poems in 1867 made important additions, and in this way and that his poetical production reached by the time of his death no inconsiderable volume—perhaps five hundred pages averaging thirty lines each, or very much more than has made the reputation of some English poets of very high rank. Until late in his own life the general tendency was not to take Mr. Arnold very seriously as a poet; and there are still those who reproach him with too literary a character, who find fault with him as thin and wanting in spontaneity. On the other hand, there are some who not only think him happier in verse than in prose, but consider him likely to take, when the "firm perspective of the past" has dispelled mirages and false estimates, a position very decidedly on the right side of the line which divides the great from the not great.
Family, local, and personal reasons (for Dr. Arnold had a house in the immediate vicinity of Rydal), as well as the strong contemporary set in favour of Wordsworth which prevailed in both universities between 1830 and 1845, caused Mr. Arnold early to take a distinctly Wordsworthian bent. He was, later, somewhat outspoken in his criticism of Wordsworth's weaker points; but it is impossible for any one to read his own poems without perceiving that Arnold stands in a line of filiation from Milton, with a slight deviation by way of Gray, through Wordsworth, though with a strong personal element in his verse. This personal element, besides other things, represents perhaps more powerfully than it represents anything else, and than anything else represents this, a certain reaction from the ornate and fluent Romanticism of the school of Keats and Tennyson. Both, especially the latter, influenced Mr. Arnold consciously and unconsciously. But consciously he was striving against both to set up a neo-classic ideal as against the Romantic; and unconsciously he was endeavouring to express a very decided, though a perhaps not entirely genial or masculine, personal temperament. In other words, Mr. Arnold is on one side a poet of "correctness"—a new correctness as different from that of Pope as his own time, character, and cultivation were from Pope's, but still correctness, that is to say a scheme of literature which picks and chooses according to standards, precedents, systems, rather than one which, given an abundant stream of original music and representation, limits the criticising province in the main to making the thing given the best possible of its kind. And it is not a little curious that his own work is by no means always the best of its kind—that it would often be not a little the better for a stricter application of critical rules to itself.
But when it is at its best it has a wonderful charm—a charm nowhere else to be matched among our dead poets of this century. Coleridge was perhaps, allowing for the fifty years between them, as good a scholar as Mr. Arnold, and he was a greater poet; but save for a limited time he never had his faculties under due command, or gave the best of his work. Scott, Byron, Keats, were not scholars at all; Shelley and Tennyson not critical scholars; Rossetti a scholar only in modern languages. And none of these except Coleridge, whatever their mere knowledge or instruction, had the critical vein, the knack of comparing and adjusting, at all strongly developed. Many attempts have been made at a formula of which the following words are certainly not a perfect expression, that a poet without criticism is a failure, and that a critic who is a poet is a miracle. Mr. Arnold is beyond all doubt the writer who has most nearly combined the two gifts. But for the present we are only concerned with his poetry.
This shows itself distinctly enough, and perhaps at not far from its best, in almost his earliest work. Among this earliest is the magnificent sonnet on Shakespeare which perhaps better deserves to be set as an epigraph and introduction to Shakespeare's own work than anything else in the libraries that have been written on him except Dryden's famous sentence; "Mycerinus," a stately blending of well-arranged six-lined stanzas with a splendid finale of blank verse not quite un-Tennysonian, but slightly different from Tennyson's; "The Church of Brou," unequal but beautiful in the close (it is a curious and almost a characteristic thing that Matthew Arnold's finales, his perorations, were always his best); "Requiescat," an exquisite dirge. To this early collection, too, belongs almost the whole of the singular poem or collection of poems called "Switzerland," a collection much rehandled in the successive editions of Mr. Arnold's work, and exceedingly unequal, but containing, in the piece which begins—
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,