Oh! exquisite malady of the soul,
How hast thou marred me—
put the thing well. Those who have once tasted his poetry return, and probably, though they are never likely to be numerous, always when they have once tasted will return, to the visions and the melodies—
Of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.
Another poet whose death brings him within our range, and who may be said to belong, with some striking differences of circumstance as well as individual genius, to the same school, was James Thomson, second of the name in English poetry, but a curious and melancholy contrast to that Epicurean animal, the poet of The Seasons. He was born at Port-Glasgow on 23rd November 1834, and was the son of a sailor. His parents being in poor circumstances, he obtained, as a child, a place in the Royal Caledonian Asylum, and, after a good education there, became an army schoolmaster—a post which he held for a considerable time. But Thomson's natural character was recalcitrant to discipline and distinguished by a morbid social jealousy. He gradually, under the influence of, or at any rate in company with, the notorious Charles Bradlaugh, adopted atheistic and republican opinions, and in 1862 an act of insubordination led to his dismissal from the army, for which he had long lost, if he ever had, any liking. It is also said that the death of a girl to whom he was passionately attached had much to do with the development of the morbid pessimism by which he became distinguished. For some time Thomson tried various occupations, being by turns a lawyer's clerk, a mining agent, and war correspondent of a newspaper with the Carlists. But even before he left the army he had, partly with Mr. Bradlaugh's help, obtained work on the press, and such income as he had during the last twenty years of his life was chiefly derived from it. He might undoubtedly have made a comfortable living in this way, for his abilities were great and his knowledge not small. But in addition to the specially poetical weakness of disliking "collar-work," he was hampered by the same intractable and morose temper which he had shown in the army, by the violence of his religious and political views, and lastly and most fatally by an increasing slavery to drink and chloral. At last, in 1882, he—after having been for some time in the very worst health—burst a blood-vessel while visiting his friend the blind poet Philip Bourke Marston, and died in University College Hospital on 3rd June.
This melancholy story is to be found sufficiently reflected in his works. Those in prose, though not contemptible, neither deserve nor are likely to receive long remembrance, being for the most part critical studies, animated by a real love for literature and informed by respectable knowledge, but of necessity lacking in strict scholarship, distinguished by more acuteness than wisdom, and marred by the sectarian violence and narrowness of a small anti-orthodox clique. They may perhaps be not unfairly compared to the work of a clever but ill-conditioned schoolboy. The verse is very different. He began to write it early, and it chiefly appeared in Mr. Bradlaugh's National Reformer with the signature "B. V.," the initials of "Bysshe Vanolis," a rather characteristic nom de guerre which Thomson had taken to express his admiration for Shelley directly, and for Novalis by anagram. Some of it, however, emerged into a wider hearing, and attracted the favourable attention of men like Kingsley and Froude. But Thomson did nothing of importance till 1874, when "The City of Dreadful Night" appeared in the National Reformer, to the no small bewilderment probably of its readers. Six years later the poem was printed with others in a volume, quickly followed by a second, Vane's Story, etc. Thomson's melancholy death attracted fresh attention to him, and much—perhaps a good deal too much—of his writings has been republished since. His claims, however, must rest on a comparatively small body of work, which will no doubt one day be selected and issued alone. "The City of Dreadful Night" itself, incomparably the best of the longer poems, is a pessimist and nihilist effusion of the deepest gloom amounting to despair, but couched in stately verse of an absolute sincerity and containing some splendid passages. With this is connected one of the latest pieces, the terrible "Insomnia." Of lighter strain, written when the poet could still be happy, are "Sunday at Hampstead" and "Sunday up the River," "The Naked Goddess," and one or two others; while other things, such as "The fire that filled my heart of old," must also be cited. Even against these the charge of a monotonous, narrow, and irrational misery has been brought. But what saves Thomson is the perfection with which he expresses, the negative and hopeless side of the sense of mystery, of the Unseen; just as Miss Rossetti expresses the positive and hopeful one. No two contemporary poets perhaps ever completed each other in a more curious way than this Bohemian atheist and this devout lady.
So far in this chapter the story of poetry, from Tennyson downwards, has been conducted in regular fashion, and by citing the principal names which represent the chief schools or sub-schools. But we must now return to notice a very considerable company of other verse-writers, without mention of whom this history would be wofully incomplete. Nor must it by any means be supposed that they are to be regarded invariably as constituting a "second class." On the contrary, some of them are the equals, one or two the superiors, of Thomson or of O'Shaughnessy. But they have been postponed, either because they belong to schools of which the poets already mentioned are masters, to choruses of which others are the leaders, or because they show rather blended influences than a distinct and direct advance in the main poetical line of development. Others again rank here, and not earlier, because they are of the second class, or a lower one.
Of these, though he leaves a name certain to live in English literary history, if not perhaps quite in the way in which its author wished, is Martin Farquhar Tupper, who was born, in 1810, of a very respectable family in the Channel Islands, his father being a surgeon of eminence. Tupper was educated at the Charterhouse and at Christ Church, and was called to the bar. But he gave himself up to literature, especially poetry or verse, of which he wrote an enormous quantity. His most famous book appeared originally in 1839, though it was afterwards continued. It was called Proverbial Philosophy, and criticised life in rhythmical rather than metrical lines, with a great deal of orthodoxy. Almost from the first the critics and the wits waged unceasing war against it; but the public, at least for many years, bought it with avidity, and perhaps read it, so that it went through forty editions and is said to have brought in twenty thousand pounds. Nor is it at all certain that any genuine conception of its pretentious triviality had much to do with the decay which, after many years, it, like other human things, experienced. Mr. Tupper, who did not die till 1889, is understood to have been privately an amiable and rather accomplished person; and some of his innumerable minor copies of verse attain a very fair standard of minor poetry. But Proverbial Philosophy remains as one of the bright and shining examples of the absolute want of connection between literary merit and popular success.
It has been said that Lord Tennyson's first work appeared in Poems by Two Brothers, and it is now known that this book was actually by the three,—Frederick, Charles, and Alfred. Frederick, the eldest, who, at a great age, is still alive, has never ceased verse-writing. Charles, who afterwards took the name of Turner, and, having been born in 1808, died in 1879, was particularly famous as a sonneteer, producing in this form many good and some excellent examples. Arthur Hallam, whom In Memoriam has made immortal, was credited by the partial judgment of his friends with talents which, they would fain think, were actually shown both in verse and prose. A wiser criticism will content itself with saying that in one sense he produced In Memoriam itself, and that this is enough connection with literature for any man. His own work has a suspicious absence of faults, without the presence of any great positive merit,—a combination almost certainly indicating precocity, to be followed by sterility. But this consummation he was spared. John Sterling, who has been already referred to, and who stands to Carlyle in what may be called a prose version of the relation between Tennyson and Hallam, wrote some verse which is at least interesting; and Sir Francis Doyle, also elsewhere mentioned, belongs to the brood of the remarkable years 1807-14, having been born in 1810. But his splendid war-songs were written not very early in life.
Of the years just mentioned, the first, 1807, contributed, besides Mr. Frederick Tennyson, the very considerable talent of Archbishop Trench, a Harrow and Trinity (Cambridge) man who had an actual part in the expedition to Spain from which Sterling retreated, took orders, and ended a series of ecclesiastical promotions by the Archbishopric of Dublin, to which he was consecrated in 1864, which he held with great dignity and address during the extremely trying period of Disestablishment, and which he resigned in 1884, dying two years later. Trench wrote always well, and always as a scholar, on a wide range of subjects. He was an interesting philologist,—his Study of Words being the most popular of scholarly and the most scholarly of popular works on the subject,—a valuable introducer of the exquisite sacred Latin poetry of the Middle Ages to Englishmen, a sound divine in preaching and teaching. His original English verse was chiefly written before the middle of the century, though perhaps his best known (not his best) verses are on the Battle of the Alma. He was a good sonneteer and an excellent hymn-writer.
1809 contributed three writers of curiously contrasted character. One was Professor Blackie, an eccentric and amiable man, a translator of Æschylus, and a writer of songs of a healthy and spirited kind. The second, Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, a poet of Parables, has never been popular, and perhaps seldom arrived at that point of projection in which poetical alchemy finally and successfully transmutes the rebel materials of thought and phrase into manifest gold; but he had very high and distinctly rare, poetical qualities. Such things as "Old Souls," "The Snake Charmer," "The Palmist," three capital examples of his work, are often, and not quite wrongly, objected to in different forms of some such a phrase as this: "Poetry that is perfect poetry ought never to subject any tolerable intellect to the necessity of searching for its meaning. It is not necessary that it should yield up the whole treasures of that meaning at once, but it must carry on the face of it such a competent quantity as will relieve the reader from postponing the poetic enjoyment in order to solve the intellectual riddle." The truth of this in the main, and the demurrers and exceptions to it in part, are pretty clear; nor is this the place to state them at length. It is sufficient to say that in Dr. Hake's verse, especially that part of it published between 1870 and 1880 under the titles Madeline, Parables and Tales, New Symbols, Legends of the Morrow and Maiden Ecstasy, the reader of some poetical experience will seldom fail to find satisfaction.