What he loved before all was “touches of nature,” the humour, the pathos, of ordinary life. He liked home-thrusts at human foibles and frailty, and again the outwelling of native nobility, generosity, or love. Newman’s early Sermons, “Plain and Parochial” as they were, perhaps for this very reason he much affected. “The best that were ever written in my judgment,” he said. He remained an admirer of Newman, and speaks enthusiastically of the Apologia and its “sincerity.” But he did not like the ritualism of the Oxford movement. His traditions were Evangelical,—one reason perhaps why he liked Newman. John Wesley was “one of his heroes,” and he had much sympathy with, and was at one period personally drawn by, evangelical and revivalist Mission preaching.
He would have sympathized with Keble’s lines teaching that his fellow-creatures should not
Strive to wind themselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky.
This was probably one of the reasons why he did not like “In Memoriam.” He said indeed that he thought it too artistic, too machine-made. He said that he thought Tennyson became gradually altogether too artistic and lost in spontaneity, vigour, and freshness. Yet he himself was a most laborious artist, both in his verse and in his prose. Omar is most carefully elaborated, with correction on correction, and so are the best parts of Euphranor. His reasons were really deeper, and went more against the matter than the form. He did not like the early “Idylls of the King.” “The Holy Grail” he liked as he had liked the “Vision of Sin.” But what moved him to tears was the old-style “Northern Farmer,” the “substantial, rough-spun Nature he knew,” and “the old brute, invested by the poet with the solemn humour of Humanity like Shakespeare’s Shallow.” Yet even here a “crotchet” cropped up, as appears from the following note:
Woodbridge, May 20th, 1877.
The enclosed scrap from Notes and Queries reminded me (as probably the writer has been reminded) of your Old Farmer, the only part of which that goes against me is the “canter and canter away” of the last line. I can scarce tell you (as usual with me) why I don’t like Doctor Fell; but you know I must be right.
By the by, my old Crabbe in the Parish Register (Burials), says
Bless me! I die—and not a warning giv’n—
With much to do on earth, and all for Heaven:
No preparation for my soul’s affairs,
No leave petitioned for the Barn’s repairs, etc.
not very good; and (N.B.) I don’t mean it suggested anything in Shakespeare’s Northern Farmer—for that may pair off with Shallow.