and while his manly sense prevented him from taking refuge in a return to the past, he saw little in the present to encourage him. Yet his mood varies from the utter dejection of Dover Beach to the comparative hopefulness of The Future. On the whole he grew less pessimistic with advancing life, as we may see by comparing the two Obermann poems, separated in composition by eighteen years. An important division of his personal poetry is that which comprises his elegies. It is characteristic of him that he should be "at his best in the mood of lament "—as in Thyrsis, a monody on the death of Clough, and Rugby Chapel, in memory of his father. His elegiac poetry never confines itself to a simple expression of sorrow; it invariably becomes reflective and philosophical. At times the directly critical element is uppermost, as in Memorial Verses (1850) and Heine's Grave, which are connecting links. between Arnold's work in verse and his work in prose. Characteristics.-Arnold's poetry has in a high degree the classic qualities of poise, temperance, and reserve. Careful workmanship and purity and dignity of style are among its prominent technical features. Though his ear was not perfect, his lyrical measures are generally satisfying, while his blank verse has a stately movement of its own. His moral spirit is always noble, and his fine stoicism prevents his melancholy from becoming debilitating. But his austerity and apparent coldness, and his want of "joyful and bounding emotion," have stood in the way of his popularity, and he is still a master for the cultured few. ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH (1819-61) Life and Character.-Arthur Hugh Clough was born in Liverpool on January 1, 1819, and was educated at Rugby and Oxford. Compelled by religious scruples to resign his tutorship and fellowship, and failing to find a congenial opening in England, he emigrated to America, where he lived for a year by writing and teaching. In 1853, on the offer of a post in the Education Office, he returned home, and in 1854 he married. After a few years of happy domestic life, his health gave way; he vainly sought restoration in travel, and died at Florence, November 13, 1861. Clough was a man of beautiful character, intellectually fearless and honest, and a sincere seeker after truth. It is enough to say of him that he fully merited his friend Arnold's noble tribute in Thyrsis. Works. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848); Ambarvalia (1849); Amours de Voyage (written 1849; published 1858); Dipsychus (posthumous); Mari Magno (posthumous). Views.-Amid all the religious disturbances of his life, Clough repudiated altogether the mental jugglery by which men continually attempt for their own comfort to make fact fit in with preconceived notions or inherited beliefs. We must "look straight out at things" and take the consequences: "let fact be fact, and life the thing it can."" This "austere love of truth" dominated all his thought. In regard to poetry he maintained that, if the poet is to hold his ground with modern readers against the novelist, he must abandon mythology and deal with subjects which have a living meaning for the world of to-day. He himself had little interest in poetry "that did not touch some deep question, some vital feeling in human Poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich is a delightful love story, touched with pleasant humour, and written in hexameters of the Evangeline type. Amours de Voyage is another serio-comic love story, also in hexameters. In the character of Claude, the unheroic hero, Clough exhibits that " over-educated weakness of purpose which, he held, was likely to result from the introspective tendencies of modern culture. Dipsychus (unfinished), a latter-day, unromantic Faust, presents a study of idealism in its daily conflict with the power of the world. Clough's minor poems are almost entirely concerned with his religious doubts and cravings and moral convictions. Some of his lyrics, like Qua Cursum Ventus and Say not the struggle nought availeth, are of great excellence. Characteristics. Clough's poetry is rather intellectual than imaginative or passionate. Furthermore, it is almost entirely a poetry of self-analysis and selfdelineation, expressing with convincing sincerity the writer's spiritual unrest, his resolute facing of fact, his single-hearted devotion to truth. Yet while thus pre-eminently subjective, Clough, like Arnold, was also the mouthpiece of his generation, whence his importance in the religious and literary history of the time. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1806–61) Life and Character.-Elizabeth Barrett was born at Coxhoe Hall, near Durham, on March 6, 1806. Her health was poor, and for many years she lived the secluded life of an invalid, devoting herself to study and composition. Her marriage with Robert Browning, in defiance of the wishes of her father, took place in 1846, and she died in Florence in 1861. The severe discipline of suffering and sorrow served only to ennoble her character and enlarge her sympathies; she was, as Hawthorne said, "sweetly disposed towards the human race, though only remotely akin to it."" Works. Her principal publications are: The Battle of Marathon (1820); An Essay on Mind (1826); The Seraphim, and other Poems (1838); Poems (1844 and 1850); 1 Letter, March 9, 1853. Dipsychus, II. 8 Review of some Poems, by A. Smith and M. Arnold, in Prose Remains. • Memoir prefixed to Prose Remains. Italian Notebooks, p. 11. Casa Guidi Windows (1851); Aurora Leigh (1856); Poems before Congress (1860); Last Poems (1862). Views. In religion Mrs. Browning was a devout Christian; in politics, a strong Liberal, though, like her husband, she had a horror of Socialism. The essence of art for her was its power of perceiving the ideal in the real, the divine in the natural; Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes (Aurora Leigh, VII.); and such an one is the true artist. Art's the witness of what Is, and if in any age men fail to realize the Poems. NARRATIVE POEMS. Aurora Leigh, Mrs. Browning's most ambitious effort, is virtually a modern sociological novel in nine books of fluent blank verse. It sets forth her "highest conceptions upon Life and Art." 2 Lady Geraldine's Courtship, another " romance of the age," tells of the love of a high-born lady for a humble poet. Its sentiment, though much in the taste of the time, now seems a little cheap. The romantic poems, Rhyme of the Duchess May, Lay of the Brown Rosary, Romaunt of Margret, etc., are vigorous and picturesque, but gushing and overwrought. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL POEMS.-The Cry of the Children is the finest expression of Mrs. Browning's humanitarianism, and has its place beside Hood's Song of the Shirt. Casa Guidi Windows and Poems before Congress show her passionate sympathy with the cause of Italian independence. RELIGIOUS POEMS.-The Seraphim, "a diffuse, mystical passion-play," and A Drama of Exile, describing "the new and strange experiences of the fallen humanity. with a peculiar reference to Eve's allotted grief," are of little ... 1 Aurora Leigh, V. 2 Dedication. 3 Stedman. • Preface. value. Many of the minor religious poems, on the other hand (e.g., He giveth His Beloved Sleep, Cowper's Grave), have great tenderness and beauty. PERSONAL POEMS.-The chief of these are the Sonnets from the Portuguese, which take rank among the finest love-poerns in our literature. Characteristics.—Mrs. Browning's faults are numerous and glaring. Wholly wanting in self-restraint, she allows her feminine emotion to run away with her, and is often extravagant and at times hysterical. Her unchecked fluency degenerates into volubility, and there are very few of her poems which do not suffer from prolixity and dilution. Her poetic vocabulary is full of affectations, and in her metre and rhymes she is both careless and perverse. But against these defects many sterling qualities have to be set down. She was a woman of real genius; her work is pervaded by a noble sincerity and a large and generous human feeling; she has passion, imagination, and power; and the melody of her verse at its best is new and beautiful. SUPPLEMENTARY READING LIST Texts. TENNYSON: Complete Works, ed. Hallam Tennyson (Eversley edition); Works (Macmillan, 1894; new ed. 1901).—BROWNING, R.: Poetical Works, ed. A. Birrell and F. G. Kenyon (17 vols., Smith, Elder, 1888-94; 2 vols., 1900-1).—ARNOLD, M.: Poems (Eversley edition, 3 vols., Macmillan, 1895; I vol., Macmillan, 1890); Poetical Works (Globe edition).—CLOUGH, A. H.: Poems (Macmillan, 1862; new ed. 1890); Poems and Prose Remains (2 vols., Macmillan, 1869).-BROWNING, E. B.: Poems (2 vols., Smith, Elder, 1856; 1 vol. 1898); A Selection from the Poetry of E. B. Browning (2 vols., Smith, Elder, 1866-80). Studies. TENNYSON, HALLAM, Lord: Tennyson: a Memoir (2 vols., Macmillan, 1897).—Lyall, Sir A.: Tennyson (English Men of Letters, Macmillan, 1902).-LANG, A.: Tennyson (Modern English Writers, Blackwood, 1901).-Brooke, S. A.: Tennyson, his Art and Relation to Modern Life (Isbister, 1894); The Poetry of R. Browning (Isbister, 1902).-The Lives of R. Browning by W. H. GRIFFIN and H. C. MINCHIN, Mrs. ORR, G. K. CHESTERTON (Men of Letters, Macmillan, 1903), and W. SHARP (Great Writers).-HOWDEN, E.: Letters of R. and E. Browning (2 vols., Murray, 1899).—Orr, Mrs. : Handbook to Browning's Works (Bell, 1890).—SYMONS, A.: Introduction to the Study of Browning (Dent, 1906). BERDOE, E.: Browning Cyclopædia (Allen, 1896).—Jones, H.: Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher (Nelson, 1891).-The monographs on Arnold by H. PAUL (English Men of Letters, Macmillan, 1902), G. SAINTSBURY (Modern English Writers, Blackwood, 1899), and G. W. E. RUSSELL (Literary Lives, Hodder, 1904).-Arnold's Letters, ed. G. W. E. Russell (Macmillan, 1906).-WADDINGTON, S.: Clough (Bell, 1883).—OsbornE, J. G.: A. H. Clough (Constable, 1920).—INGRAM, J. H.: Life of E. B. Browning (Eminent Women, Allen, 1888).-WHITING, L.: A Study of E. B. Browning (Gay and Bird, 1899).-BROWNING, MRS.: Letters, ed. F. G. Kenyon (2 vols., Smith, Elder, 1897; 3rd ed. 1908). CHAPTER 6. VICTORIAN NOVELISTS New Developments in the Novel: Realism and Romanticism, Influence of Science, The history of the 18th-century novel really closes with Thackeray, who aspired to be another Fielding, and protested against the ideals of the Romantic Movement. The influence of that movement shows itself most unmistakably in the Brontë sisters, whose novels and poems were dominated by a Wordsworthian feeling for nature, a frank consciousness of passion, and a sense of the deeper things that make the poetry of life. The Brontës form a link between the older realists and the fiction of Hardy and Meredith, which has affiliation with poetry. Dickens had shown some tendencies in the same direction. With Mrs. Gaskell and George Eliot the novel becomes thoroughly realistic again in method, and in intention more and more philosophical. Both wrote as moralists; and George Eliot's diagnosis of life was deepened by the half-a-lifetime of study she had given to modern psychology, metaphysics, and ethics, before she began to write fiction. In these novelists we see the influences at work that had affected poetry in the previous half-century. We also see a general awakening of the social consciousness. Characters from the lower classes had hitherto been introduced for the sake of picturesqueness or comic effect; they now became the central figures of the story. Finally, in the latter part of the 19th century the development of science began to react powerfully on fiction. CHARLES DICKENS (1812-70) Life. Charles Dickens belonged to the needy lower middle-class which forms the subject of most of his novels. Born at Portsea, he spent his boyhood at Chatham, and then at Camden Town. His father was a Government clerk in poor circumstances, who was unable to give him much in the way of education, and fell into monetary difficulties, which resulted in the lad's being sent to work in a blacking warehouse at Hungerford Stairs. Dickens, however, got two more years' schooling before he had to start life in earnest. His father was now a parliamentary reporter; Dickens taught himself shorthand, and obtained a similar post. As a member of the reporting staff of the Morning Chronicle, he supplemented his regular journalism by contributing sketches of life to this and other papers. These were collected and published in two series as Sketches by Boz (1835-6). |