Class ^fi.£14 
 
 Book. 
 
 Oxl 
 
 >taN°_ 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 
 
BooRlovers Reading Club 
 
 Y¥ n r\. «4 .Ra *tlc 
 
 ffiTTiliw! 
 
 VICTORIAN POETS 
 
 homas Bailey Aldi 
 
 Professor T. R. LOUNSBURY 
 Professor T* M. PARROTT 
 
 Marie Ada Molineux 
 
 The Booklovers Library 
 

 * 
 
 ISSUED FROM THE PRESS OF 
 THE BOOKLOVERS LIBRARY 
 1323 WALNUT ST., PHILADELPHIA 
 
 (5) 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
1 
 
 "^HE BOOKLOVERS READING 
 CLUB HAND-BOOK TO AC- 
 COMPANY THE READING COURSE 
 ENTITLED, THE GREATER VIC- 
 TORIAN POETS 
 
 SEYMOUR EATON 
 
 L i b r a r i a n 
 
 FREDERIC W. SPEIRS, Ph.D. 
 
 Educational Director 
 
 (7) 
 
^ 
 
 
 
 THE LIBRARY or 
 90NGRESS 
 
 Two Copies Reoemeo 
 
 JAN. 3 1902 
 
 Copyright er.r h < 
 
 CLASS CUXXo. Wo. 
 
 COPY B. 
 
 c 
 
 The ] 
 
 OPYRIGHT, I9OI 
 JOOKLOVERS LlBRART 
 
THE GREATER 
 VICTORIAN POETS 
 
 Course XVIII : Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 BOOKS SELECTED 
 
 FOR THIS READING COURSE 
 
 by 
 
 M* THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 
 
 (9) 
 
The BO O K S 
 
 &&^ HE following three books are supplied by 
 
 f ■,:• 'The Booklovers Library to Club Members 
 
 ^p^r^fS who have enrolled for Course XVII I. 
 
 /. VICTORIAN POETS 
 
 (Edmund Clarence Stedman) 
 
 //. THE POETRY OF TENNYSON 
 
 (Henry van Dyke) 
 
 ///. LIFE AND LETTERS OF 
 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 (Mrs. Sutherland Orr) 
 
 The course of reading as outlined in this handbook 
 is based on these books. Suggestions for supplementary 
 reading will be found at the end. 
 
 (») 
 
T h e B O O K S 
 
 ^^^^^^^HE following three books are supplied by 
 Hi T Wr ^ e B°°klovers Library to Club Members 
 <^fe^E5s^ who have enrolled for Course XVII I. 
 
 /. VICTORIAN POETS 
 
 (Edmund Clarence Stedman) 
 
 //. THE POETRY OF TENNYSON 
 
 (Henry van Dyke) 
 
 ///. LIFE AND LETTERS OF 
 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 (Mrs. Sutherland Orr) 
 
 'The course of reading as outlined in this handbook 
 is based on these books. Suggestions for supplementary 
 reading will be found at the end. 
 
 (ii) 
 
THE GREATER 
 VICTORIAN POETS 
 
 TALKS and LECTURES 
 
 by 
 
 THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY 
 
 and 
 
 THOMAS M. PARROTT 
 
 and 
 
 MARIE ADA.MOLINEUX 
 
 These papers by Professor Lounsbury, Professor 
 
 Parrott and Miss Molineux have been prepared 
 
 especially for readers of this course. 
 
 EDITORIAL NOTES 
 
 by 
 Professor T. M. PARROTT 
 
 (13) 
 
A WORD from THE DIRECTOR 
 
 E offer our course on "The Greater Vic- 
 torian Poets" just at the close of the 
 Victorian age. It is notoriously unsafe 
 to judge literary achievement at close 
 range, but however radical may be the 
 readjustment of relative values by pos- 
 terity there is at present a very general 
 agreement that the greatest poets of the period 
 under consideration are the three treated in our 
 course — Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and 
 Matthew Arnold. 
 
 The books which have been chosen for us by 
 
 (*5) 
 
A Word from the Director 
 
 Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich comprise a general 
 treatise on Victorian poetry, a critical study of the 
 work of Tennyson, and a biography of Browning. 
 Mr. Stedman's book, The Victorian Poets, is a 
 rapid survey of the whole field by a critic of the 
 highest standing. Dr. Van Dyke's critique, The 
 Poetry or Tennyson, is the work of an ardent 
 admirer who writes with the purpose of giving 
 " some reasons for thinking that Tennyson stands 
 among the great poets, if not on a level with the 
 greatest." Mrs. Orr s book is of special value 
 as the authorized biography of Browning. 
 
 The papers in the handbook deserve most care- 
 ful reading. Professor Loimsbury is one of our 
 foremost scholars in the field of English literature, 
 and his review of early Victorian poetry is as 
 authoritative as it is interesting. Miss Moli- 
 neux, the editor of A Phrase-Book of the 
 Works of Robert Browning, is an enthusiastic 
 special student of the poet, and her presentation of 
 his work is most sympathetic. The third and 
 longest paper in the handbook was prepared to 
 ?neet a special need which developed as we pro- 
 ceeded with the construction of our course. We 
 found that only one of the books which Mr. 
 Aldrich chose for us deals with Matthew Arnold, 
 and that volume gives a comparatively brief 
 
 (16) 
 
A Word from the Director 
 
 account of the life and work of one of the 
 greatest of recent English poets. Professor Par- 
 rott has therefore contributed an ad?nirable 
 detailed study of Arnold which supplements very 
 satisfactorily the inadequate treatment of Mr. 
 Stedmans book. Through this paper our course 
 attains its proper balance. 
 
 The handbook affords ample suggestion and 
 careful guidance to those who wish to make a 
 serious study of the poets and the poetry of the 
 era under review. The topical outline, the stimu- 
 lative questions, the lists of typical poems, the 
 annotated bibliography , and the other suggestions 
 to the reader are the work of a college professor 
 of literature who is thoroughly skilled in the art 
 of teaching a larger class than can be reached 
 with the voice. The reader who avails himself 
 of all the possibilities for study which Professor 
 Parrott suggests will finish the course with a 
 comprehensive and intimate knowledge of the 
 greater Victorian poets. 
 
 (17) 
 
The Idea of the Course 
 
 O period in English literature appeals 
 |\J so directly to us as the age bearing the 
 name of the great queen who has but 
 recently passed away. We have grown 
 up under its surrounding influence. 
 Its poets, novelists, historians, and es- 
 sayists were familiar names to our 
 childhood ; they furnished in large part 
 the mental stimulus and the spiritual 
 guidance of our youth. There are, no doubt, 
 greater names in English literature than any that 
 the Victorian age can show. Yet just because 
 that age lies so near to us and is, indeed, the 
 immediate progenitor of our own civilization, cul- 
 ture, and religious attitude, its poets and thinkers 
 are dearer to us and more sympathetic than the 
 greater men of a more distant past. 
 
 For the Victorian era is already a past age. 
 The death of the queen in February, 1901, did 
 not so much close the age as proclaim to the 
 world that it was past. For nearly two decades 
 before her death the voices of the poets' chorus 
 that had glorified her reign were one by one fall- 
 ing into silence. The death of Morris in 1896 
 seems, perhaps, to mark the true close of Vic- 
 torian poetry. Swinburne, indeed, still lives, the 
 sole survivor of those who once were called the 
 
 (19) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Clu 
 
 younger Victorian poets. But Swinburne, even 
 in the judgment of his admirers, has outlived not 
 only his age but his own period of true poetic 
 creatiqn. 
 
 We are coming, then, to a time when we can 
 at least make the attempt to judge the Victorian 
 poets with the impartial eyes of posterity. A cer- 
 tain distance from the object is necessary to give 
 the proper sense of proportion, and as the Vic- 
 torian age recedes into the background, we begin 
 for the first time to realize its true place in the 
 history of English literature and to perceive 
 accurately the relative position which its great 
 poets bear to each other and to their predeces- 
 sors. The equally extravagant outbursts of 
 insult and panegyric which greeted the earlier 
 and the later poems of Browning have now be- 
 come impossible. There seem to be plain signs 
 of the diminution of that extraordinary influence 
 which Tennyson once exerted alike upon poets 
 and critics of poetry. On the other hand, as the 
 din of the social and theological polemics into 
 which Arnold flung himself dies away, his fame as 
 a poet emerges with a clearer and more steadfast 
 radiance. Perhaps it may be the chief literary 
 business of the present age not so much to pro- 
 duce new work as to rejudge and properly 
 appreciate the work of the age that has just 
 closed. 
 
 The materials for this rejudgment and appre- 
 
 (20) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 ciation are already at hand. During the last 
 years of Victoria's reign there appeared an im- 
 mense amount of biographical and critical litera- 
 ture dealing with the chief poets of her time. 
 From this mass three volumes have been selected 
 for the course here presented. No pretence 
 is made that these books contain a final estimate 
 of the poetic quality of the age as a whole or a 
 definitive criticism of its chief poets. The time for 
 such work had not yet arrived when these books 
 were written. But the first gives us a general 
 •oversight of the period such as can be gained 
 nowhere else ; the second offers an enthusiastic 
 appreciation of Tennyson which may serve at once 
 as a corrective to the increasing tendency to 
 depreciate that poet's work, and, in the minds of 
 some readers at least, to provoke the question 
 whether its sweeping eulogies will be echoed by 
 posterity ; while the third, with all its manifest 
 shortcomings, remains the standard biography of 
 Browning and is our chief, and often sole, author- 
 ity for the facts of his life and the traits of his 
 character. 
 
 It is with the hope, therefore, of stimulating a 
 new appreciation of the greater Victorian poets 
 that this course is presented to the public. The 
 three books here offered are, of course, merely 
 introductory ; but material is also presented in 
 the shape of critical comment, supplementary 
 reading, lists of typical poems, stimulative ques- 
 
 (21) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 tions, and topics for papers and open discussion, 
 which, if properly used, will furnish a foundation 
 for an original, impartial, and relatively correct 
 estimate of the chief figures in one of the most 
 brilliant epochs in the history of English literature. 
 
 (22, 
 
HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS TO 
 THE READER 
 
 Mr. Stedman's Victorian Poets, written more 
 than a quarter of a century ago and enlarged 
 some twelve years later, is generally recognized 
 in this country and in Great Britain as the best 
 existing treatise on the subject. That it is not 
 wholly satisfactory the author himself would be 
 the first to admit. He has, indeed, in his "Sup- 
 plementary Review," endeavored, in at least two 
 cases, to correct and broaden a somewhat narrow 
 or unsympathetic treatment. But even with this 
 addition, scant justice is done to Matthew Arnold 
 and to Rossetti. Toward Browning the critic seems 
 to have experienced a change of heart between 
 the time of the first appearance of the book and 
 its revision in 1887. In consequence such a 
 noble collection of poems as Dramatis Personcs is 
 hastily dismissed as " for the greater part, ragged, 
 uncouth, and even puerile," while the far inferior 
 Jocoseria receives a flattering mention as com- 
 posed of "brief and sturdy poems." Tennyson, 
 on the other hand, is treated with a full and 
 discerning criticism, and if he seems to fill some- 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 what too large a portion of the book, little else 
 could be expected from a critic of his own day 
 who had grown up under the spell of his art and 
 fame. 
 
 In fact, the defects of the work as a whole 
 spring from one inevitable cause. In 1875, or 
 even in 1887, it was still impossible to form a 
 correct estimate of the Victorian age as a whole, 
 or of the proper relation of its great poets to each 
 other. And it must be said, too, that Mr. Sted- 
 man's interest lies rather in the poet's expression 
 than in his conception ; he deals with form rather 
 than with thought. Yet when all this is said, his 
 work remains a singularly valuable piece of criti- 
 cism, always urbane, generally sympathetic, dom- 
 inated by high artistic ideals, and full of poetic ap- 
 preciation. No other work gives at once so 
 broad a view of the whole field and so detailed a 
 study of its principal features. The student who 
 prefers to concentrate his attention on these latter 
 should read with particular attention chapters 1, in, 
 v, vi, ix ; section in of chapter x ; and that portion 
 of the " Supplementary Review " which deals with 
 Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold. Readers who 
 prefer to study the whole work with equal atten- 
 tion should supplement this book by Mr. Sted- 
 man's Victorian Anthology or Palgrave's Golden 
 Treasury of Songs, second series, both of which 
 contain a good selection from the minor poets of 
 the era. 
 
 (24) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 Dr. Van Dyke calls his book The Poetry of 
 Tennyson, "a study of the growth of a poet's 
 mind and of the perfecting of his art." There can 
 be no doubt that this method — the evolutionary 
 method, as it is sometimes called — is one of the 
 most profitable ways of approaching a great poet. 
 Particularly is this so in the case of Tennyson, 
 whose long life and steady growth set a vast dis- 
 tance in art and thought between the immature 
 productions of his youth and the ripe fruit of his 
 old age. In reading this book for the first time 
 the intercalary chapters on ''Milton and Tenny- 
 son" and "The Bible in Tennyson" may well 
 be omitted, so as to concentrate attention on the 
 development of the poet. 
 
 One of the chief merits of this book is the way in 
 which it calls attention alike to the poet's mes- 
 sage and to its artistic presentment. "Art for 
 art's sake " has never been a received doctrine in 
 the world of English letters, and although English 
 poetry may have suffered by an occasional intru- 
 sion of didacticism, the loss has been more than 
 recompensed by its moral dignity and permanent 
 ethical value. It is impossible to estimate the 
 work of any great English poet from the esthetic 
 side alone. On the other hand, too many modern 
 critics are inclined to neglect altogether the form 
 and artistic merit of the poet and to lay stress 
 solely upon his ideas and teachings. This is 
 notably the case with much of the so-called litera- 
 
 ls) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 ture of exposition that has gathered round the 
 name of Browning. Dr. Van Dyke happily avoids 
 both of these extremes. 
 
 The book is distinctly subjective in tone. As 
 the author points out in his interesting preface, it 
 is the work of one who has grown up from early 
 childhood under the strong- and abiding influence 
 of the poet whose work it discusses. It is appar- 
 ent that such a treatment cannot claim to be 
 an impartial or final estimate of the poet. The 
 author is rather Tennyson's advocate than his 
 judge. But this form of criticism, the expository 
 form, has its recognized place in critical literature, 
 and in so far as, in the author's words, it "leads 
 or drives men to read a great poet, it has served 
 its purpose in the order of the universe." 
 
 Mrs. Sutherland Orr's book, The Life and Let- 
 ters of Robert Browning, is far from being a satis- 
 factory biography. It is patchy and scrappy, dis- 
 proportioned in matter and unpleasing in tone. It 
 lays more stress upon the incident that in a certain 
 autumn Browning found it necessary to change 
 his quarters from one French village to another, 
 or upon the petty fact that in several editions, 
 the name " Karshook " stood where "Karshish'* 
 now appears in One Word More, than on such 
 weightier matters as the development of the poet's 
 mind and art, the causes for his long neglect 
 and sudden appreciation by the public, and his 
 
 (26) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 relation to the great intellectual and moral prob- 
 lems of his time. Reasons for this lack of pro- 
 portion may doubtless be found. Mrs. Orr pro- 
 fessedly does not believe in the development 
 of Browning's poetic genius ; as a leading light in 
 the first Browning Society she may possibly be 
 indifferent to the public attitude toward a poet 
 whom the members of that society strove to 
 make the idol of an intense and narrow cult, and 
 her tone in her occasional references to Brown- 
 ing's religious opinions as expressed in his work 
 is one of such offensive patronage as could only 
 be adopted by a New Woman toward a man 
 unfortunate enough in her eyes to have a senti- 
 mental weakness for an "old world religion." 
 Yet with all its faults, the book is, for our present 
 purpose, the best biography of Browning. It is 
 the only authorized account of his life ; it contains 
 a number of his letters that are nowhere else to be 
 found ; and the account of his boyhood and youth 
 is based upon the recollections of his sister. It is, in 
 short, a storehouse of information in regard to the 
 facts of the poet's life ; and some of its numerous 
 anecdotes contribute distinctly toward a clearer 
 and firmer conception of the poet's personality 
 than the author herself seems to have attained. 
 
 The student should read this book, then, for 
 facts and impressions. Its critical utterances may 
 be set aside without any loss whatever. But 
 in Brownino-'s case, far more than in that of most 
 
 (27) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 English poets, the value of the work depends, for 
 the general reader, upon his knowledge of the 
 poet's personality and character. For Brown- 
 ing is, first of all, a thinker, a preacher of ideas 
 and ideals, a champion of causes ; and unless we 
 feel that his utterances were the sincere expres- 
 sion of his own beliefs, his championship the 
 hearty advocacy of causes that lay near his own 
 heart, our interest in the substance of his work 
 vanishes and we are thrown back upon the esthetic 
 enjoyment of his form. Now, although Brown- 
 ing's formal or esthetic merits are at once great 
 and strangely neglected by the majority of his crit- 
 ics, yet they are not enough of themselves to 
 recommend him to the great mass of readers. It 
 is evident, therefore, that in order to do justice to 
 Browning the poet, we must know something of 
 Browning the man. And in default of a biogra- 
 phy at once as full and more sympathetic, we are 
 compelled to fall back upon this book of Mrs. 
 Orr's. 
 
 The papers printed in this pamphlet are meant 
 to supplement the books of the course. Profes- 
 sor Lounsbury gives a capital view of the condi- 
 tions of English poetry during the time in which 
 the greater Victorian poets slowly rose to promi- 
 nence ; Miss Molineux presents an enthusiastic 
 appreciation of Browning ; and the paper on 
 Arnold attempts to present an estimate of a poet 
 
 (23) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 who is somewhat slightingly passed over in Mr. 
 Stedman's book, and of whose life and work no 
 satisfactory account as yet exists. 
 
 Special attention is called to the lists of typical 
 poems printed on pages 1 27-1 30 of the handbook. 
 So far as is possible all the poems referred to in 
 the books of the course should be read. But in 
 addition to this the student will find it extremely 
 profitable to read in their order all the poems 
 named in these lists. By this means he will obtain 
 as in no other fashion a view of the growth, devel- 
 opment, and cardinal characteristics of each of the 
 three great Victorian poets. 
 
 (29) 
 
The Course Arranged by 
 Topics: Part I. Victorian Poets 
 
 by EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 
 
 i. General Characteristics of the Pe- 
 riod. Influence of environment; culture and 
 spontaneity. Twofold duty of the critic. Sci- 
 ence and poetry ; their temporary antagonism 
 and approaching harmony. Restrictions set 
 by the age to poetic expression ; their results 
 on poetic form. 1-32 
 
 2. Walter Savage Landor. The pioneer 
 
 of Victorian poetry. Intellectual quality of his 
 work. Order of his works. Artistic perfec- 
 tion ; lyric abundance ; dramatic bent ; limita- 
 tions. His prose works, their poetic qualities. 
 His personality. 33~7 2 
 
 3- Hood, Arnold, and Procter; the 
 Poets of the Crowd, the Closet, and the 
 Open Air. hood : humor, sympathy, general 
 characteristics. Arnold : intellectual qualities, 
 mental attitude, limitations. .Procter (Barry 
 Cornwall) : spontaneity of song, dramatic 
 faculty, lyrical variety. 72—113 
 
 (30 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 4- Mrs. Browning, the Chief of Woman 
 Poets. Early studies. First poems, their 
 defects and merits. Married life and mature 
 power. Last poems. Estimate of her genius ; 
 imperfections, sympathetic quality, subjective 
 tone. Representative position. 1 14-149 
 
 5. Tennyson, the Representative Poet of 
 His Time. Beginning's ; poetic growth. 
 Poems of 1842 ; their comprehensive range. 
 The Princess. In Memoriam. Occasional 
 verse as laureate. Maud, its unequal merit. 
 The Idyls of the King, his masterwork. Enoch 
 Arden. Characteristics of his genius ; syn- 
 thetic perfection, technical excellence, idyllic 
 mode. Limitations, mannerism, lack of dra- 
 matic gift. Tone of mind, liberal conservatism. 
 Tennyson and Byron. Tennyson and Theoc- 
 ritus, similarity between their eras, points of 
 likeness in their work. 150-233 
 
 6. Minor Poets. State of poetry at the 
 opening of the era. Influence of Wordsworth. 
 The meditative school. Independent poets. 
 Song writers. The spasmodic school. Later 
 poets. Influence of Tennyson. Prevalence 
 of the idyl; vers de societe ; translations; 
 hymns ; dialect poems. Woman poets. Latest 
 schools. Influence of Browning and Rossetti. 
 
 3- 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 General survey. Tone and manner of the 
 minor poets. Outlook for the future. 234-292 
 
 7- Robert Browning. Dramatic genius; 
 subjectivity. His special field. His method, its 
 shortcomings. Natural gifts. Evils of his style. 
 The succession of early works (1835-1846). 
 Dramatic lyrics, dramatic studies. His most 
 representative volume ; its defects and merits. 
 Moral quality of verse ; its main lesson. Later 
 poems (1864-1875). Estimate of his genius; 
 originality and lawlessness. 293—34.1 
 
 8. The Movement toward New Poetic 
 
 Forms. buchanan: influence of Words- 
 worth ; Scotch idyls and London poems ; meta- 
 physical verse ; versatility, rossetti : his influ- 
 ence ; translations and original verse ; diction 
 and style ; love of beauty ; ballads, lyrics, and 
 sonnets ; range and quality of verse, morris : 
 an artist of the beautiful ; ballad-romances, 
 narrative poems ; their merits ; moral defects. 
 Swinburne : the master of rhythm ; mastery of 
 poetical technique ; faults of excess ; early 
 dramas. Atalanta in Calydon, its place in 
 English literature. Poems and Ballads, moral 
 questions raised by their appearance ; influ- 
 ences at work on his genius ; elegiac poems ; 
 revolutionary poems ; dramatic works. 
 
 342-414 
 
 3M 33 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 9. A Supplementary Review. Enlarged 
 and corrected judgments, tennyson: dramatic 
 efforts ; later lyrics. browning: later works 
 (1 875-1 887) ; use of rime, involved style, dra- 
 matic psychology ; relation to his time. Swin- 
 burne : later lyrics and dramas, dead poets: 
 Rossetti, Home, and others, living poets : 
 Arnold, Morris, and others. new poets : 
 Symonds, Edwin Arnold, Austin, Lewis Mor- 
 ris, and others. the field : Gosse, Mackay, 
 Michael Field, Robert Bridges, Oscar Wilde. 
 society verse: Dobson and Lang, the out- 
 look : technical finish ; limited inspiration ; lack 
 of a national style. 4.15-483 
 
 (34) 
 
The Course Arranged by 
 Topics: Part II. The Poetry of 
 Tennyson by henry van dyke 
 
 i. Early Poetry. Poems by Two Brothers; 
 characteristics ; influence of Byron. Poems, 
 Chiefly Lyrical (1830), Poems by Alfred 
 Tennyson (1832), Poems (1842); their recep- 
 tion by the critics. The Palace of Art ; its 
 first and last forms ; moral of the poem. J-46 
 
 2. Milton and Tennyson. Tennyson's 
 references to Milton ; points of resemblance 
 in their early lives and early poems ; their con- 
 ception of marriage ; their love of country. 
 Paradise Lost and The Idyls of the King ; 
 Paradise Lost and In Memoriam. 4.9-107 
 
 3- Poems of Middle Life. The Princess : 
 defects and merits. Maud : dramatic quality. 
 In Memoriam : twofold character ; Arthur 
 Henry Hallam ; analysis of the poem. 
 
 iii-i$r 
 
 4- Idyls of the King. Order of composi- 
 tion ; significance of title ; unity of the series. 
 The Arthurian legend ; Malory's Morte 
 
 (35) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 d Arthur ; use of this material. Modern 
 spirit of the poems ; its justification. Style ; 
 allegoric and parabolic elements ; the dominant 
 idea and its elaboration. Cardinal defect. 
 Great truths embraced in the poems. 155-2 ij 
 
 5- Historic Plays. Minor plays. Tennyson's 
 plays as closet dramas. Purpose of the plays. 
 Harold, Becket, Queen Mary. 221-242. 
 
 6. The Bible in Tennyson, influence of 
 
 the Bible upon the English language ; upon 
 Tennyson's work. Biblical quotations, scenes, 
 and characters in Tennyson ; harmony of Ten- 
 nyson's religious conceptions with biblical 
 doctrine. 243-276 
 
 7- Last Poems. Locksley Hall Sixty Years 
 After ; its relation to the first Locksley Hall. 
 Demeter, and Other Poems. Special qualities 
 exhibited. The Death of CE?wne, Akbar^s 
 Dream and Other Poems ; relative value of 
 this volume ; subjects treated. 279-301 
 
 8. Suggestions for the Study of Ten- 
 nyson. Classification ; its value. Sug- 
 gested arrangement and order of reading. 
 Conclusion. 305-344 
 
 (36) 
 
The Course Arranged by 
 Topics : Part in. Life and 
 Letters of Robert Browning 
 
 fc.MRS. SUTHERLAND ORR 
 
 Ancestry and Early Days. The 
 Browning family. The poet's mother, his child- 
 hood, school days. Earliest poems. Influence 
 of Shelley. Choice of poetry as a calling. 
 
 r-75 
 
 Early Poems and First Drama. Pau- 
 line: its poetic qualities, reception by critics. 
 Paracelsus : origin of the poem ; aim of the 
 poet ; poetic qualities ; reception by the liter- 
 ary world. Social recognition. Strafford: 
 Browning and Macready ; composition and 
 performance of the play ; limited success. 
 
 76-136 
 
 Sordello and Bells and Pomegranates. 
 Sordello : Period of preparation; its inspira- 
 tion ; its character and style. Bells and Pome- 
 granates : form in which the series appeared ; 
 meaning of title. A Blot in the 'Scutcheon: 
 first performance. Other plays and poems of 
 the series. 137—200 
 
 (37) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 4- Courtship and Early Married Life* 
 
 Acquaintance with Miss Barrett. Secret mar- 
 riage ; reasons for this step. Life in Italy. 
 Birth of Browning's son and death of his 
 mother. Life and friends in Paris. 201—259 
 
 5- Renewed Poetic Activity and Last 
 Years of Married Life. New edition of 
 
 the early poems. Christmas- Eve and Easter- 
 Day ; religious tone of these poems. Essay 
 on Shelley. Men and Women, an omitted 
 poem. The Browning child. Spiritualism. 
 Illness and death of Mrs. Browning. 260-556 
 
 6. Middle Life. The great sorrow. Re- 
 moval to London. Growing fame. The Ring 
 and the Book ; its conception ; its reception. 
 The character of Pompilia. Fifine at the Fair. 
 Red Cotton Nightcap Country. London life. 
 Love of music. Aristophanes Apology. Grow- 
 ing love of nature. La Saisiaz ; its occasion, 
 its relation to Christian doctrine. 357—4&6 
 
 7. Later Life and Work. Return to Italy ; 
 Asolo and Venice. Dramatic Idyls. New 
 departure in his poetic method. The Browning 
 Society, Browning's relation to it, its influence 
 on the public. Loss of friends. Parleyings. 
 
 4^7-533 
 
 (38) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 8. Personal Characteristics ; Last Years 
 
 and Death. Browning's strength of affec- 
 tion, optimism, subjective character of mind, 
 religious and poetical opinions. Browning's 
 attitude toward the public ; toward his own 
 work. Browning as a talker, his nervous tem- 
 perament, benevolence, attitude toward women. 
 Life in London and Italy ; Asolo ; last days in 
 Venice. Death and burial. Browning's mes- 
 sage. 534~ 6 34 
 
 (39) 
 
POETRY in the EARLY 
 VICTORIAN ERA: 
 
 A Review by T. R. lounsbury 
 
 (41) 
 
POETRY in the EARLY 
 VICTORIAN ERA: 
 
 A Review by t. r. lounsbury 
 
 Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury, professor of 
 English in Yale since 187 1, was graduated from 
 that University in 1859. His literary labors began 
 almost immediately after with work on Appleton's 
 American Cyclopedia. At the end of two years 
 he enlisted in the army. It was during his military 
 service in the Civil War that he began to study 
 Anglo-Saxon, to which he devoted several years 
 afterthe close of the Rebellion. His History of the 
 English Language, the first edition of which ap- 
 peared in 1879, has been adopted as a text-book 
 in many colleges. He has edited Chaucer's Par- 
 lament of Foules and written the Life of fames 
 Fenimore Cooper in the American Men of Letters 
 series. Studies in Chaucer, in three volumes, is 
 generally considered his masterpiece. A volume 
 entitled Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist has 
 been issued as one of the bi-centennial publica- 
 tions of Yale University, the first of a series which, 
 under the general title of Shakespearian Wars, will 
 give an account of the controversies in regard to 
 the dramatist. 
 
 The Victorian era, strictly so-called, begins 
 with the accession to the throne, in 1837, of 
 the queen from whom it derives its name. In 
 reality it begins seven years before, with the death 
 of George IV. in 1830. This last-named date 
 makes a sufficiently marked dividing line between 
 the old and the new, between the literary spirit 
 which was going out and that which was coming in. 
 
 (43) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 "Never," said Schiller, "come the immortals 
 alone." One fact which stands out strikingly in 
 the history of literature is that the great writers 
 come not singly, but in groups. Even if some 
 one of them should be universally recognized as 
 distinctly preeminent, he is almost invariably at- 
 tended by a body of associates, not attaining his 
 rank, to be sure, but each one of whom may sur- 
 pass him in particular respects. There are ex- 
 ceptions to this rule. There are instances of men 
 standing out alone in their age and country. But 
 the exceptions are not frequent. It is not often 
 that a solitary voice is recognized in any period 
 as being apart from and above those of all its fel- 
 lows, as happened in the case of Milton in the 
 middle of the seventeenth century. 
 
 For anything resembling the intellectual display 
 which was witnesssed during the last half of the 
 reign of George III. we must go back to the time 
 of Elizabeth. Its coming had been foreshadowed 
 by the appearance of Cowper ; it had made a most 
 impressive manifestation of itself in the sudden 
 leap into fame of a Scottish peasant ; but it reached 
 its highest splendor in the nearly simultaneous 
 appearance of writers such as Scott, Wordsworth, 
 and Coleridge, to be speedily followed by Byron, 
 Shelley, and Keats. These are but a few of the 
 names which could be cited. Yet alongside of 
 them and their work the productions of the much- 
 lauded age of Queen Anne sink into comparative 
 
 (44) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 obscurity. It is certainly to be reckoned a won- 
 derful era in the literary annals of any country 
 when authors of the genius of Campbell, Moore, 
 Leigh Hunt, Landor, Crabbe, and a host of others 
 must be accorded only a second place. 
 
 By 1830 this great intellectual outburst had 
 spent its force. The men who had created it were 
 either dead or apparently burnt out. If they 
 continued to produce, what they wrote might have 
 just as well, in most instances, been left unwrit- 
 ten. Three of the greatest poets of the Georgian 
 era — Byron, Shelley, and Keats — had died in the 
 flower of youth. Scott, though not really an old 
 man, had entered into the valley of the shadow of 
 death. Coleridge was moralizing and monologuiz- 
 ing in the villa at Highgate. Moore, Campbell, 
 Wordsworth, and others continued still to write 
 poetry occasionally, but the verse they produced 
 lacked spontaneity and distinction. In general, 
 too, they betook themselves to the humbler work 
 of prose. 
 
 To take the place of these veterans no one was 
 apparently coming forward. So at least it seemed 
 to the critics of those days. The periodical liter- 
 ature immediately preceding and following the 
 accession to the throne of Queen Victoria is full 
 of dolorous lamentations in reference to the de- 
 cay which had overtaken poetry. Prophecies of 
 its ultimate disappearance are constantly indulged 
 in. Science, we are told, has usurped its place, 
 
 (45) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 and the attractions which its revelations afford 
 to readers will henceforth displace all the inter- 
 est which men have hitherto felt in the world of 
 spirit. It is the old story in the history of litera- 
 ture that is here repeated, the old opinions and 
 sayings that are again revived and set a-going. 
 In the interval that elapses between the passing 
 away of one literary movement and the coming in 
 of its successor there is regularly the complaint 
 that the efforts of the human mind have been ex- 
 hausted ; henceforth we are to look forward to an 
 age of prose ; facts are to take the place of the 
 creations of the imagination, positive knowledge 
 that of inspiration. 
 
 No one who familiarizes himself with the crit- 
 ical writings of the two decades from 1830 to 
 1850 can fail to be struck by the hopeless view 
 taken of the present condition and future pros- 
 pects of creative literature. All the leading peri- 
 odicals of the time, with the quarterlies at their 
 head, express the same despondent feelings. 
 There was, or at least there seemed to be, for it 
 a certain justification. Everybody appeared to 
 have lost the interest in poetry which earlier in 
 the century had been general. In the case of new 
 authors, publishers were unwilling to bring out at 
 their own expense volumes containing it. Even 
 when they did this for writers who had already 
 attained celebrity, they lost by the venture. At 
 any rate, they said so, and this, so far as the author 
 
 (46) 
 
The Gr eat er Victorian Poets 
 
 was concerned, amounted to the same thing. 
 Wordsworth explained this decay of interest as 
 being due to over-production. Whatever the 
 cause, there could be no doubt of the fact. The 
 most successful poem of the third decade of the 
 nineteenth century, so far as that was indicated 
 by the literary distinction it conferred, was the 
 drama of Philip Van Artevelde. It was brought 
 out by its author, Henry Taylor, at his own ex- 
 pense, and though its limited number of copies 
 was speedily disposed of, his publisher, for all 
 that, seems to have been successful in bringing 
 him into debt. Browning's relatives bore the ex- 
 pense of his early publications. Moxon told him 
 in 1835 tnat Tennyson's poetry had a good deal 
 of repute at Cambridge, but still of the volume of 
 1833 he had sold but three hundred copies. In 
 truth, no poetical work of that time was expected 
 to pay for the cost of its production. 
 
 Not only were the men of that time despondent 
 about the future of poetry, they felt that they had 
 the fullest right to be despondent from the char- 
 acter of the productions which appeared. Nearly 
 all the surviving representatives of the older school 
 of critics honestly believed that there were few, if 
 any, signs of promise to be observed, at least of 
 poetic promise. In this, too, they repeated the 
 experience of other periods. They not merely 
 failed to see any new luminary rising above the 
 horizon, they were incapable of recognizing it 
 
 (47) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 after it had risen. The fact in itself is not sur- 
 prising. It is always a difficult, and in some cases 
 an impossible, thing for men who have been 
 trained in one set of literary traditions to have 
 much sympathy with, or genuine appreciation of, 
 works in which new methods of art have been 
 practiced and through which an essentially differ- 
 ent spirit breathes. The followers of Dryden and 
 Pope could not recognize the new element which 
 had been brought into literature by Wordsworth. 
 They were still more revolted by that of Shelley 
 and Keats, though they had been swept along, as 
 was every one, by the irresistible energy which 
 Byron had imparted to English verse. A corre- 
 sponding state of mind showed itself in the early 
 years of the Victorian era. The men who had 
 been brought up on the literature which had 
 passed away could not discern much, if anything, 
 that was attractive in that which was coming in. 
 Here two or three men who sang a new tune had 
 shown themselves. It was not necessarily better 
 or worse than that to which they had been accus- 
 tomed, but it was different. It did not appeal to 
 them. Sometimes they expressed their disap- 
 proval of it loudly. More frequently they ignored 
 it altogether. 
 
 Of the depth of this feeling and of the lateness 
 of the time to which it lasted we can get some 
 conception from the opinion expressed by Macau- 
 lay in a letter written to his friend, Ellis, under 
 
 (48) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 date of March 9, 1850. "It is odd," he said, 
 " that the last twenty-five years — which have wit- 
 nessed the greatest progress ever made in phys- 
 ical science, the greatest victories ever achieved 
 by man over matter — should have produced 
 hardly a volume that will be remembered in 
 1900." Let us say nothing of his own writings, 
 which in secret he doubtless excepted from this 
 sweeping prophecy. Nor let us say anything of 
 his fellow essayist and historian, Carlyle. Let us 
 keep silence, too, about the productions of the 
 two most famous novelists of the middle of the 
 century, several of whose finest works had already 
 appeared before 1850, not to speak of writers be- 
 low the grade of the very highest whose books 
 continue still to be published and republished, to 
 be read and re-read. It is Macaulay's ignorance 
 of the two greatest of his poetical contemporaries 
 which impresses us. At that period, to be sure, 
 the reputation of one was limited to a very small 
 circle, but that of the other had at last attained 
 general recognition. Yet the most omnivorous 
 reader of his time knew nothing about either, or 
 else had no conception whatever of the greatness 
 of their genius. Certainly among the host of un- 
 fulfilled predictions with which literary history 
 abounds, this prophecy about the year 1900 is 
 worthy of the highest place. 
 
 Tennyson and Browning were the two greatest 
 poets of the early Victorian era, and such they 
 
 4 m (49) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 remained until its end ; but both had to make 
 their way against studied depreciation of their 
 work, entertained and expressed by most critics 
 of the old school. It was very slowly that they 
 came to be recognized and acknowledged save by 
 a comparatively insignificant number. A differ- 
 ent view has sometimes been taken of the success 
 of Tennyson, but it is unfounded. A great deal 
 of praise, no doubt, welcomed his first volume of 
 1830, but the immensely superior contents of his 
 next venture, the volume of 1833, were received 
 coldly and in most instances depreciatingly. The 
 satirical but inconceivably fatuous review which 
 Lockhart published of that work in the April 
 Quarterly of that year was the final stroke which 
 practically shut off for a whole decade all disposi- 
 tion on the part of Tennyson to publish. The 
 two pieces that appeared in the interval were 
 wrung from him rather than contributed. We 
 know now with what dubious feelings the volumes 
 of 1 842 were sent to the press, what little hope of 
 success was entertained from them either by the 
 poet himself or by his friends. In fact it is doubtful 
 if even at that time they would have been brought 
 out, had not the intimation been distinctly con- 
 veyed to the author that his two previous volumes 
 would be reprinted in their entirety in America, 
 with or without his consent. As such a republica- 
 tion would include many pieces which he was 
 anxious to have forgotten, he was fairly forced to 
 
 (5°) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 take some action to avert the blow. The book 
 pirate is not an estimable or a lovely character, 
 but there are occasions when he has served a 
 useful purpose. 
 
 The volumes of 1842 lifted Tennyson into 
 prominence at once. They placed him in a few 
 years at the head of living- English poets. But it 
 is an error to assume that this position was 
 speedily attained or that there were not many to 
 dispute his claims to consideration. In general it 
 may be said that no author of the Victorian era 
 owed less to professional critics than he. In his 
 case they followed public opinion, they never led 
 it. This was true of his later as well as his earlier 
 volumes. The critic either lagged behind the 
 reader in appreciation or condemned at the outset 
 what he was subsequently forced to approve. 
 The magnificent Ode on the Death of the Duke of 
 Wellington was received at first with an almost 
 unanimous shout of depreciation. Poems in the 
 volumes of 1842 had become the favorites of the 
 public long before the tardy recognition of their 
 merit was found in the principal critical periodi- 
 cals. With the exception of a review by John 
 Forster in the Examiner, three months elapsed 
 before they were noticed in the leading literary 
 weeklies. The articles which appeared in the 
 three quarterlies, though written by personal 
 friends, were in no instance enthusiastic. They 
 were, perhaps, not allowed to be ; this was true of 
 
 (SO 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 at least one of them. Successful, too, as the 
 work was in extending Tennyson's reputation, a 
 year passed before a second edition of it was 
 called for. 
 
 Furthermore, the general acceptance of his 
 poetry by the public did not cause the critics of 
 the old school to cease from their hostility. The 
 veteran John Wilson Croker was honestly indig- 
 nant that John Sterling had been allowed to con- 
 tribute to the Quarterly his utterly inadequate 
 and far from enthusiastic review of the volumes of 
 1842. We all know of the attack made upon 
 "school miss Alfred" as late as 1846 by Bulwer 
 in the early editions of The New Timon, and 
 the sledge-hammer blows with which the "school 
 miss," under the signature of Alcibiades, demol- 
 ished the novelist in the pages of Punch. The 
 speedy omission of the abusive passages from 
 the further editions of Bulwer' s poem showed 
 that Tennyson had then attained a popularity 
 which it was no longer safe for a man, even writ- 
 ing anonymously, to assail. Yet ignorance often 
 prevailed where hostility did not. The words of 
 Macaulay have already been given. Another 
 prominent scholar of the time, George Cornewall 
 Lewis, was not only himself a highly educated 
 man, but spent his life largely with men eminent 
 in literature. Yet when the laureateship became 
 vacant by the death of Wordsworth in 1850, he 
 suggested to the head of the ministry, to which he 
 
 (52) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 belonged, that the place should be offered to the 
 author of Philip Van Artevelde. He was exceed- 
 ingly surprised to hear that Tennyson was under 
 consideration, as he conceived that he was an 
 author but little known and that his claims would 
 not be generally recognized. 
 
 The general recognition of Browning's great- 
 ness came, as we all know, much later. It must 
 be admitted, however, that it was largely his own 
 fault. Browning seems to have been born with a 
 congenital incapacity to put himself in the position 
 of his reader, and this natural inability was in- 
 creased rather than diminished by the desultory 
 education he received. He could never be made 
 to appreciate the difficulties he created, and hon- 
 estly attributed to unwillingness to put forth the 
 requisite exertion what was really owing to his 
 habit of imposing upon those seeking acquaint- 
 ance with his writings a burden which they should 
 not have been expected to bear. Naturally, he 
 paid the penalty for this course. In his later life 
 he was inclined to exult over the fact that his first 
 published work had not sold a single copy. But 
 there is no question, whatever he may have been 
 disposed to think afterward, that his second work, 
 Paracelsus, which came out in 1835, awakened 
 the highest hopes for his future. It did not meet, 
 to be sure, with a large sale ; but at that time no 
 poetry of a high order met with a large sale. On 
 the other hand, it made a profound impression 
 
 (53) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 upon the minds of many whose appreciation was 
 itself an earnest of fame. All these anticipations 
 were sensibly lowered by the appearance of 
 Strafford ; for most men they were completely 
 destroyed by the publication in 1 840 of Sordello. 
 Not even his warm friend and ardent advocate, 
 John Forster, felt himself able to review that 
 work. It has been reserved for the later disciples 
 of the poet to find it particularly enjoyable, and 
 to look with pitying and patronizing eyes upon 
 the inferior intellects which have found its mean- 
 ing escape their grasp. 
 
 The havoc which Sordello wrought with Brown- 
 ing's reputation is indicated by the fate which 
 befell the series of volumes bearing the general 
 title of Bells and Pomegranates. They were eight 
 in number. The first, containing Pippa Passes, 
 came out in 1841 ; the last, which contained Luria, 
 and one of his most striking pieces, A Soul's 
 Tragedy, appeared in 1846. These successive 
 volumes naturally vary in excellence as they do 
 in character, but as a whole they present some of 
 the finest poetic achievement of the Victorian 
 era. Many of the pieces found in them now 
 form part of the literary treasures of every edu- 
 cated man. It seems almost incredible that some 
 of these volumes should not have created some- 
 thing of a sensation at their first appearance. 
 But Sordello had done its work. Men refused to 
 look at anything which Browning wrote. During 
 
 (54) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 «m— — — «=— m—mmm— «m— mmbiiiiii i iMrnrTunM i i i II ■ II iiiihii iiiiiii 
 
 the successive years that the volumes of this 
 series passed through the press, hardly any 
 notices of them can be found in the critical litera- 
 ture of the time. The few that appeared were 
 almost invariably brief and often of a purely per- 
 functory character. It was not hostile comment 
 the poems excited ; there was scarcely any com- 
 ment at all. The indifference of the critics was 
 shared by the general public. The successive 
 parts of Bells and Pomegranates, though brought 
 out in a cheap form, met with but little sale. 
 Still to those who study carefully the literary his- 
 tory of the early Victorian era, it is plain that the 
 unwarranted and fairly scandalous neglect which 
 Browning's poetry at one time received was in a 
 measure his own work. This may not excuse it, 
 but it explains it. The fortunes of the husband 
 are all the more noticeable when contrasted with 
 those of the woman who became his wife. In 
 1844 the limited reputation which Miss Barrett 
 had been enjoying was at once broadened and 
 deepened by the publication of her two volumes 
 of poems. Henceforth until her death she had a 
 place in public estimation second only to that of 
 Tennyson. During all that period she was 
 regarded by the great mass of readers — of culti- 
 vated readers, be it remembered — as altogether 
 superior to her husband. No one outside of 
 a limited circle ever thought then of questioning it. 
 Mrs. Browning is now as unduly underrated as 
 
 (55) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 she was then unduly exalted. Her defects are 
 much more insisted upon than her very positive 
 merits. It seems strange that there ever could 
 have been a time when she was rated higher than 
 her husband. Yet this state of things not only 
 existed, it lasted from her marriage, in 1846, until 
 her death, in 186 1. 
 
 Finally, it may be added that the most success- 
 ful poetry of the early Victorian era, as measured 
 by its sale, was of a moral and religious type. 
 Pollok's The Course of Time, first published in 
 1827, continued to be its favorite epic. Even to 
 this day it occasionally serves a useful purpose in 
 furnishing a text-book for parsing. Far the most 
 popular poet of the fourth decade of the nine- 
 teenth century, so far as indicated by the circula- 
 tion of his works, was Robert Montgomery. We 
 know of him now only from the critique of 
 Macaulay. This is often spoken of as having 
 crushed the writer. It did nothing of the sort. 
 The poem attacked ran through edition after edi- 
 tion the very year in which the criticism appeared ; 
 and like good fortune attended all his publications 
 for several years after, until he of his own accord 
 relinquished poetry for the pulpit. It was no sys- 
 tem of puffing, as Macaulay asserted, which sud- 
 denly lifted the natural son of a circus clown into 
 prominence and sold by thousands poems brought 
 out by a somewhat obscure publisher. It was sim- 
 ply a fondness for religious sentiment and cheap 
 
 (56) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 morality, sugar-coated by a sort of poetry which 
 rimed and rattled easily. A not essentially dis- 
 similar result was attained a little later by Tupper 
 in consequence of putting thoughts and feelings 
 of the same nature into a new and striking form. 
 The first part of that author's Proverbial Philoso- 
 phy appeared in 1838, and during the years 
 that followed countless editions of it were sold. 
 Pollok, Robert Montgomery, and Tupper, if we 
 look merely at the statistics of sale, easily sur- 
 passed in popularity all other poets of the early 
 Victorian era, though one of them had died before 
 it opened. Unfortunately for them all, it was not 
 popularity with the right sort of persons. 
 
 (^P^y\y K.^^e^^*^ 
 
 (57) 
 
ROBERT BROWNING: 
 
 A Talk by MARIE ADA MOLINEUX 
 
 (59) 
 
ROBERT BROWNING: 
 
 A Talk by MARIE ADA MOLINEUX 
 
 Although a native of California, Marie Ada 
 Molineux has been a resident of Boston since 
 early childhood. She is a graduate of Boston 
 University, and has received the degree of Ph.D. 
 from that institution. Miss Molineux is a lecturer 
 on psychology, but her best known work has 
 been along the lines of English literature. For 
 several years she was secretary of the Browning 
 Society of Boston, and she has lectured exten- 
 sively to clubs and schools upon Browning's 
 poetry, some of which she has set to music. In 
 1896 she published A Phrase Book from the Poetic 
 and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning , a work 
 which has commended itself favorably to students 
 of the poet. 
 
 Among Victorian poets, indeed among all 
 English poets, a unique position is held by 
 Robert Browning, for no other during his own 
 lifetime has been the source of a cult and of 
 literary societies and coteries gathered in both 
 hemispheres for the exclusive study of his works. 
 Only one other, Shakespeare, is comparable 
 with Browning in this regard, and in Shakespeare's 
 case, the study clubs and the publications ap- 
 peared long after his death. Each of these two 
 poets represents the salient features of a long 
 reign of a royal woman, Shakespeare dealing 
 with a certain simplicity of life, Browning with the 
 
 (61) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 complexity of the wonderful nineteenth century ; 
 both depicting with most marvelous elaboration, 
 yet often in slight sketches, the same inexhausti- 
 ble subject, the human soul. 
 
 What a man sets himself to do, the ideal he 
 places before himself, must be the criterion of any 
 judgment as to his work. No justice could be 
 meted otherwise. Some strive to reach the goal 
 of the great in the past, some start on new lines. 
 Browning wrote and strove with no vision before 
 him save that embodied in his own standard, and 
 by that aim only is it fair to measure ; as he 
 failed or succeeded in what he planned to do, as 
 he was steadfast or weak in adherence to that 
 ideal, so we judge him. Tried by this test he rises 
 to the heights. 
 
 Browning's verse, his metres and their modifi- 
 cations, his frequent quaintness and peculiari- 
 ties, all show adaptation to the particular purpose 
 in view. It is most interesting to notice, as many 
 have done after long attention and minute exam- 
 ination, how fitted in each case the quality of the 
 versification is to the subject, the speaker, the 
 moment, the surroundings, combining- all in one 
 harmonious whole. This is particularly to be 
 noticed in The Ring and the Book, where the 
 form is in each section perfectly suited to the feel- 
 ing, the character, and the circumstances of the 
 speaker — man or woman. Extracts from certain 
 poems are often forcibly torn out and held up as 
 
 (62) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 examples of coarseness or oddity, that, when 
 read with their contexts, are seen to be suited 
 to the plan of the whole. Caliban, a perse- 
 cuted Jew, a classical scholar, and a young- girl 
 would not use the same language. It may be 
 said that Browning's verse, just because of its 
 apparent waywardness and strangeness, better 
 reflects the wayward peculiarities of his subject, 
 the soul of man. The dark, fantastic, tortuous, 
 sudden, sweet, harsh, cowardly, noble moments 
 of that mystery he helps to solve for us are mir- 
 rored in turn in his flexible rhythms. 
 
 Browning, of all the poets of his day, possessed 
 in most marvelous degree the subtile power of 
 penetrating, ranging, exploring to the uttermost 
 the complex minds of men ; of catching the twists, 
 the turns, the unexpected moral, unmoral, im- 
 moral windings of intellect and heart, and of pic- 
 turing the certain results. He shows the stern 
 law of cause and effect ; he places before us les- 
 sons to ponder and digest, sermons, seldom 
 preachments, stories from real life, each with the 
 warning or the example. 
 
 No one but Shakespeare has taught us so to 
 understand our fellow-men and ourselves. No 
 one man has so turned human brains inside out 
 and shown the logic, the illogic of their functions. 
 The student of psychology marvels at the skill 
 with which Browning enters into each man's 
 thoughts and shows how, even when admitting 
 
 (63) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 and confessing or defiantly stating his thoughts and 
 actions, he at the same time excuses and explains 
 and justifies to himself his acts and his motives, 
 thence expects to convince others of their pro- 
 priety. This is exemplified throughout his work, 
 most notably in some of the poems that might be 
 called "special pleadings," such as Fra Lippo, 
 Bishop Blougram, and others of the Men and 
 Women ; and also in The Inn Album, Luria, and 
 others of the longer poems and dramas ; but it 
 reaches its high tide in The Ring and the Book, 
 which Professor Corson justly regards as "the 
 greatest achievement of the century in blank 
 verse." The most frequent criticism of this poem 
 is of its length, but the intelligent reader, desiring 
 better to understand the human heart and its mo- 
 tives and the worth of human testimony, sees it 
 could not be shorter and be adequate. If we cut 
 here and there we lose from the effect, get a less 
 clear idea of the personages. In this poem, with 
 remarkable ability of judgment and execution, he 
 lets each character tell the same tale in his or her 
 own peculiar way, thus giving the reader the dif- 
 ferent facets of the gem, and eventually a truer 
 idea of its real shape and entirety. The compari- 
 son with a gem might seem unsuited when the 
 terrible nature of the plot is considered ; but in 
 the process of martyrdom there are two souls re- 
 vealed to the world — Caponsacchi and Pompilia — 
 that may be safely likened to gems, not flawless 
 
 (<>4) 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 at first, but large enough to bear elaborate cutting 
 and polishing, and, at last, shining with a blinding 
 lustre as patterns for feebler men and women. 
 
 When Robert Browning decided to be a poet 
 and a poet only, when he persisted in printing 
 his works and offering them for sale, and was not 
 discouraged or stayed by the fact that they had 
 but small circulation, he showed the strength of his 
 character, the depth of his genius, the richness of 
 his spirit, the bravery of patience. There is a very 
 instructive contrast to be drawn between Brown- 
 ing's conduct and that of the young Italian artist 
 whose story he told Mr. Gosse, whose defiance in 
 destroying his tools and giving up his art because 
 of unjust discrimination against him was to Brown- 
 ing's mind " an act of tame renunciation " and evi- 
 dence of more interest in the material than in the 
 spiritual. A true artist is impelled by a demon 
 of the Socratic kind. There are three self-reveal- 
 ing passages in Browning's verse which throw 
 light upon this phase of the poet's character. 
 
 " A hand 
 Always above my shoulder pushed me once." 
 
 The second is from Prospice — 
 
 " I was ever a fighter." 
 
 The third is from that last autobiographical poem, 
 which he feared was too frank and possibly ex- 
 pressive of conceit, but which he decided to per- 
 
 5m (65) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 mit to remain. It is a stanza we could ill spare 
 for its encouragement to others. In it he speaks 
 of himself as 
 
 " One who never turned his back but marched breast 
 forward, 
 
 Never doubted clouds would break, 
 Never dreamed, thougn right were worsted, wrong would 
 
 triumph, 
 Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
 Sleep to wake." 
 
 We should, however, recollect that Browning- 
 was able to give us his best because he was for- 
 tunate in four things not often combined in the 
 lot of any man or woman. He had, in the main, 
 good health, no incapacitating illnesses ; he had 
 intense human love to sweeten his life, from his 
 parents and sister, from his wife, from his son ; 
 he had a mind content with moderate comfort, not 
 ambitious for worldly luxury and Midas wealth ; 
 and he had, through his father, his friend, and 
 fate, enough to supply his modest wants with 
 some luxuries added. Under those conditions he 
 was able to "fight on, fare ever," and attain the 
 highest meed at last. One who is pursued by 
 dire poverty, ever obliged to wrest from the 
 world payments for labor sufficient to feed and 
 clothe oneself, especially if improvident enough to 
 pave hostap-es to Fortune, either lives a short life at 
 tremendous pressure and succumbs, or becomes 
 
 (66) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 a merchant and loses his art, harnessing Pegasus 
 to a plow. 
 
 The facts of the pcet's life are now well known, 
 but while he lived he yielded to the curiosity of 
 the public only when tired of being annoyed by 
 untruths, and then he gave as little as possible. He 
 felt that the private life of a writer should be his 
 own, and should not be laid open to the gaping 
 eye of the merely curious ; but personally in con- 
 verse with his friends he was frankness itself and 
 spoke his thoughts freely, a loyal and hearty friend 
 of the highest type. Probably he felt so strongly 
 his joys and griefs that it was torture to him 
 to have them mentioned by the unfeeling, and he 
 did all in his power to prevent discussion of his 
 private affairs and to save himself from the pain 
 that others were too callous to comprehend. As 
 he grew older his objections to self-revealment 
 were evidently modified, and his last poems were 
 more, although still slightly, subjective. 
 
 To his sister and his son the world owes a 
 debt of gratitude for the publication of the Letters 
 of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and of the so- 
 called "love letters" of the two — letters that are 
 so high and beautiful in tone, having nothing of 
 ''the mawkish, the unmanly," that is usually sug- 
 gested by the title, that they raise human affec- 
 tion to a higher plane and teach that the spirit 
 may be the potent ruler of life and love, that hus- 
 band and wife may live and love as examples for 
 
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The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 all. These volumes give a loftier goal, a finer 
 model to the race, and help us to realms above 
 the vulgar earth. Had they shown us ordinary 
 sentimental mortals, such as we too often meet in 
 the garish light of day and in the daily prints, 
 there had been no excuse to place them before the 
 public ; but as it is, they offer a standard attain- 
 able by all who strive toward the high, 
 
 " To have to do with nothing but the true, 
 The good, the eternal — and these, not alone 
 In the main current of the general life, 
 But small experiences of every day, 
 Concerns of the particular hearth and home : 
 To learn not only by a comet's rush 
 But a rose's birth — not by the grandeur, God — 
 But the comfort, Christ.'' 
 
 When we are obliged to forgive, excuse, shut our 
 eyes, and pity so many great geniuses among 
 men and women both of the past and of the pres- 
 ent, it is a solemn joy to be able to scan the long 
 life of this great English poet and find no blemish, 
 no hideous blot or stain, no tragedy, no departure 
 from the high moral standard set by Christianity — 
 a standard seldom attained by the greatly gifted, 
 who forget noblesse oblige and choose rather to be 
 each a law unto himself. Such loyalty to the 
 social and domestic affections, such integrity and 
 goodness, demand remark, although it might seem 
 belittlement did we not remember how needed are 
 such models in this unrestrained and heedless aere. 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 Browning's father was "a scholar and knew 
 Greek," a clerk in the Bank of England, com- 
 fortable in circumstances yet hoarding every 
 possible penny for the purchase of choice books, 
 until it became a vital question where to stow 
 them. Yet he was most generous in the bestowal 
 upon others of books and prints of rarity and 
 price. His mental and moral gifts were great, 
 and he might have excelled in the plastic arts and 
 in verse had he inclined in either direction. The 
 son inherited from both parents the qualities 
 which still show in the third generation, and the 
 poet would have been great in music, or painting, 
 or sculpture had he not cast his life in different 
 shape. The father would naturally have preferred 
 for his son a more lucrative occupation, but 
 Browning, content with little as to worldly riches, 
 preferred to expend his energies in the domain 
 of poetry and was permitted, indeed helped, to do 
 as he wished. 
 
 To his mother, a woman of remarkable beauty 
 and elevation of character, he owed much. Her 
 health was extremely delicate, and it is quite 
 likely that her son's tender friendship and care of 
 her predisposed him to undertake to restore and 
 care for the health of the woman he later insisted 
 upon marrying in spite of herself and her father's 
 known temper regarding the marriage of any of 
 his children. The world is better for the example 
 of such filial and conjugal affection. It has been 
 
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 enriched by poems neither he nor his wife could 
 have written except for their happy marriage dur- 
 ing fifteen years. The poet was never consoled 
 for the death of his companion, although he learned 
 to bear his sorrow in silence. 
 
 Mention should be made of the devoted sister 
 who gave her loving care to her mother, com- 
 forted and attended her father until he no longer 
 needed earthly tenderness, then transferred her 
 undivided attention to her bereft brother, and 
 now blesses his son by a companionship not to be 
 estimated, in his home in lovely Asolo. 
 
 It was really Sordello that scared the average 
 reader from attempting to read anything else 
 written by Browning. Sarcasm often does more 
 lasting harm than a sword thrust ; and the banter 
 of wits, many of whom had not read the poem, 
 has prevented multitudes from gaining comfort 
 and counsel from the inspiriting lines so constantly 
 met in his work. It is astonishing how often 
 one hears scornful criticism of Browning's poems 
 by men who, when driven to the wall, declare they 
 have never read nor do they intend to read a 
 single one. Le style c est r homme is here true. 
 Browning could not write, except for a few lines 
 at a time, in the average manner of Longfellow, 
 of Tennyson, of Moore. His nature was too 
 complex, his memory too tremendous, his inter- 
 ests too wide, his intense emotions too easily 
 aroused, his eyes too open to the influence of his 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 age, to permit him to sit down and in cold blood 
 write short sentences. In this respect he is the 
 reflex of the days of Darwin, and Spencer, and 
 their scientific followers or opponents. His prose 
 is not of short smooth sentences ; it is involved, 
 parenthetical, full of detail, showing the same 
 characteristics as his verse. Some of what have 
 been called his defects of style are due to his 
 connection with Germany through his maternal 
 grandfather, and, doubtless, to his desultory and 
 unsystematic education which allowed an unpruned 
 luxuriance of a sturdy stock. The fanatic boldly 
 declares him faultless, these blemishes, "beauties." 
 The just critic wishes the poet had remembered 
 that not everyone possessed so extraordinary a 
 memory as his and that he had been able to take 
 shorter breaths, make more frequent periods. 
 But in spite of all this, when once we have read, 
 again and again we return to read. One well- 
 known transcendentalist said he exclaimed, on 
 reading Sordello the third time, that he thought it 
 the worst and most incomprehensible poem in the 
 language, but after reading it the twelfth time he 
 called it the best. Here is some hyperbole, of 
 course. Only one other poem of Browning's, 
 Fifine, is parallel with this in difficulty, and these 
 two should be left to the connoisseurs, to those 
 who wish to read them, and not be forced upon 
 the unlettered. They are of great interest to the 
 philosopher and the psychologist ; and to many 
 
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 certain places in Italy and also the history of the 
 Guelph and Ghibelline struggle have been ren- 
 dered of interest by Sordello. 
 
 Now there is no ground for complaint of 
 obscurity, since loving minds and hearts and hands 
 have prepared helps in every direction. The 
 books of Berdoe, Cooke, Corson, Mrs. Orr are 
 standards, and others may be added as the need 
 arises. 
 
 In America Robert Browning has always been 
 appreciated by a few at least, and at last by a 
 multitude. More than one circle has been formed 
 for the reading and study of his works ; one or 
 two have existed for eighteen years or more. The 
 London Browning Society was founded in 1881, 
 partly for pleasure, but more to make popular 
 writings so helpful and beautiful. When that 
 work was accomplished the society dissolved. But 
 many clubs have been founded in widely distant 
 places, and while many persons look upon the 
 matter as one of fashion or hobby, others see a 
 genuine love and appreciation growing among all 
 English-speaking people. It is most interesting 
 to know that in the south of London there is a 
 social settlement called Browning Hall, and the 
 working people that congregate there love the poet 
 because he wrote about Pippa, and Herve Riel, 
 and Theocrite. One working among the newsboys 
 of Chicago found they cared to hear Browning read 
 and even "asked for more." 
 
 (m\ 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 For the reader who has little time, there could 
 be no better choice of poems for pleasure and 
 help than the two little volumes of Selections. 
 He will be led gradually to other and longer 
 works and will be richly repaid for any exertion 
 he puts forth in their perusal. 
 
 It seems a pity that one of the most important 
 of American critics and students of literature 
 should have made so superficial a study of Brown- 
 ing's poems that in the early and in the latest 
 editions the same error persists. This is evidently 
 not from the fault of the printer, because not once 
 but twice on the same page appears the name of the 
 exquisite heroine of The Ring and the Book as 
 Pampilia instead of Pompilia. And in another 
 place, although absolute authorities are many and 
 easily accessible, he nonchalantly and parentheti- 
 cally remarks on his ignorance of the order of pro- 
 duction of some of these extraordinary poems. 
 We are not of those that accuse him of what in a 
 recent preface he excuses himself from, "hos- 
 tility," but we regret he has been no more thor- 
 oughly imbued with the excellencies and beauties 
 of the poems. It must be because he has given 
 them too little time and attention. 
 
 It is pleasant to recall, in closing, that in the 
 quaint hill-town of his early and late affection, 
 Robert Browning has a fitting memorial due to 
 filial piety. Because the father wrote Pippa 
 Passes and delighted in the charming little realm 
 
 (73) 
 
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 of Queen Caterina Cornaro, the son has desired 
 to benefit that town in some lasting manner. 
 Unable to resuscitate the silk industry, he has 
 founded a lace school where young girls may 
 learn a means of livelihood other than the 
 manual labor in the fields ; and the beautiful 
 products find a market in England and among 
 those that love and honor the poet. One of the 
 pleasantest recollections is of the bright Italian 
 faces bending over their lace-pillows, each eager 
 to have the individual design and reproduction 
 viewed in turn by the eyes of the American girl 
 who had journeyed so far to see them and their 
 home — a home made famous in modern days by 
 a king among men. 
 
 (74) 
 
THE POETRY OF 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD: 
 
 A Study by T. M. PARROTT 
 
 (75) 
 
THE POETRY OF 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD: 
 
 A Study by T. M. PARROTT 
 
 Thomas Marc Parrott, a native of Ohio, was 
 graduated from the College of New Jersey, now 
 Princeton University, in the year 1888. He was 
 for two years a member of the teaching force of 
 Miami University, Ohio, and then went to the 
 University of Leipzig, where he spent three years 
 in the study of the modern languages and phil- 
 osophy. In 1893 he received the degree of doctor 
 of philosophy from that institution, his thesis being 
 a study of the non-dramatic poems of Robert 
 Browning. On his return to America Dr. Parrott 
 spent a year at Princeton as Fellow in English, and 
 two years at Lawrenceville School as assistant 
 master. In 1896 he was called to Princeton as 
 assistant professor in English, the position which he 
 still occupies. Dr. Parrott has edited Macaulay's 
 essays on Milton and Addison for the college 
 entrance requirements in English, and has con- 
 tributed a number of papers on literature, particu- 
 larly on Shakespearian topics, to the Home Study 
 department of the Chicago Record. 
 
 It is by his poetry that the place of Matthew 
 Arnold in English literature will in the end be 
 determined. Such was not, it is true, the opinion 
 of his immediate contemporaries. Whether they 
 cheered him on as a child of the Sun God slay- 
 ing with the shafts of Apollo the giants of Philis- 
 tia and the dragons of antiquated superstition, or 
 whether they shrank from him as a faithless and 
 
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 hopeless blasphemer of national traditions and 
 the ancient faith, the men of his own age thought 
 rather of his prose than of his poetry. One reason 
 for this no doubt lay in the predominating quan- 
 tity of his prose. His poems are contained in one 
 not very lengthy volume ; his essays and dis- 
 courses, his lectures and criticisms — religious, ed- 
 ucational, social, and literary — fill book after book. 
 His poetry was for the most part written before 
 he was forty years old, though he remained a 
 prominent figure in the world of letters till his 
 death at something over sixty-five. 
 
 Moreover there was something in the quality of 
 Arnold's poetic work that tended to make it 
 caviare to the general. Neither the weakness 
 nor the splendors which made Tennyson the darl- 
 ing of his age were his ; nor did he have the quick, 
 keen interest in life, the broad human sympathies 
 which so rapidly recommended Browning to the 
 hearts of thinking, feeling men and women on both 
 sides of the Atlantic, when once the spell of his 
 strange new style was broken. Arnold's first vol- 
 ume of poems attracted hardly any attention ; his 
 second he himself withdrew from the public before 
 fifty copies were sold. The splendidly sympathetic 
 review by Swinburne of the New Poems of 1867 
 marks the turn of the tide. This, Arnold' s last book 
 of verse, was the first that met with anything like 
 an appreciative reception from the general public ; 
 and with this book he laid aside his singing robes. 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 Except for the noble elegy on Dean Stanley 
 and two or three graceful and tender poems on 
 the death of some household pets, he wrote no line 
 of poetry again. 
 
 But today when his theological polemics are 
 neglected alike by friend and foe, when his social 
 ideals are, for good or evil, very rapidly left behind 
 in the tremendous advance of scientific materialism, 
 when even his literary judgments are assailed as 
 partial and subjective, the beauty and the worth 
 of his poetry are dawning more brightly upon a 
 world that begins to wonder at its own blindness. 
 A hush has fallen upon English poetry in the last 
 decade. The clanging trumpet tones of Brown- 
 ing ring no longer in our ears ; the rich and tender 
 harmonies of Tennyson no longer overwhelm the 
 other voices. Out of the past there rises the cool, 
 fine, flute-like note of Arnold — not broad, not deep, 
 but of a charm for the lovers of purity and per- 
 fection in art such as is hard to find elsewhere in 
 English poetry. 
 
 No good biography of Arnold exists, but after 
 all it does not much matter. The important facts 
 of his life are known, and his Letters, published in 
 1895, gi ve lls a presentation of his personality 
 such as few biographies afford. He was the old- 
 est son of a father scarcely less famous than him- 
 self, Dr. Thomas Arnold, the scholar, historian, 
 and preacher. He received the orthodox classi- 
 cal English education, at Winchester, at Rugby 
 
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 under his father, and at Oxford. As an under- 
 graduate at the university he did not greatly distin- 
 guish himself, although he won a prize for poetry 
 and took a fellowship at Oriel College. But he 
 drank deep of the fountains of classical literature 
 and poetry. In one sense of the word, at least, 
 he is the most classic of the Victorian poets. In 
 poetry, as in criticism, he looked back to the 
 Greeks as his models, and his love of clearness, of 
 order and restraint, of firm outline and polished 
 phrase, are largely due to his long and loving study 
 of the ancient masters. 
 
 There were, however, other influences upon his 
 youth than that of the Greeks. Foremost of 
 these, perhaps, was the influence of Goethe. No 
 other English poet reveals in the same degree as 
 Arnold the deep impression left on modern life 
 and thought by the greatest of all modern poets 
 since Shakespeare. What appealed to him espe- 
 cially in Goethe was the keen insight into the 
 problems of life, the serene and lofty spirit that 
 rose above the turmoil of the world, the mingled 
 strength and sweetness of the poet's nature. In 
 prose and verse Arnold is never weary of paying 
 homage to his master. 
 
 " He took the suffering human race, 
 He read each wound, each weakness clear; 
 And struck his finger on the place, 
 And said : Thou ailest here, and here ! 
 He look'd on Europe's dying hour 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 Of fitful dream and feverish power ; 
 
 His eye plunged down the weltering strife, 
 
 The turmoil of expiring life — 
 
 He said : The end is everywhere, 
 
 Art still has truth, take refuge there ! 
 
 And he was happy, if to know 
 
 Causes of things, and far below 
 
 His feet to see the lurid flow 
 
 Of terror, and insane distress, 
 
 And headlong fate, be happiness." 
 
 Even more important, perhaps, in its influence 
 on the young Arnold was the poetry and person- 
 ality of Wordsworth. Of all the poets of the 
 French Revolution Wordsworth has exercised the 
 greatest power over his successors in English 
 literature. Indeed, with the exception of Brown- 
 ing, the most original and independent of them all, 
 there is hardly a poet, before the advent of the Pre- 
 raphaelites, who does not show strong traces of 
 his masterful sway. But nowhere else did Words- 
 worth find so reverent a disciple as in Arnold. 
 It was not only the instinctive worship which boy- 
 hood pays to genius, though the long sojourns of 
 the Arnolds in the region where every flower, 
 and rock, and stream was sanctified by Words- 
 worth's song may have laid the foundations of 
 his discipleship. But it was because Wordsworth 
 had found the secret which Arnold sought after in 
 vain — the secret whose mystery wrung from him 
 at times his most lyrical cry. One word appears 
 again and again in Arnold's verse — "calm." In 
 
 6m (8i) 
 
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 all his strife with the crushing influences of the 
 world, in all his doubts and agonies of spirit, 
 Arnold looks forward to this goal. It is not tri- 
 umph, or knowledge, or love that Arnold prays 
 for, but serene, unshaken repose, attained after 
 the storms of life by self mastery of spirit. And 
 Wordsworth had not only attained this calm, but 
 seemed to have the power in happy moments to 
 guide his followers to the same desired haven. 
 
 " He found us when the age had bound 
 Our souls in its benumbing round ; 
 He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears. 
 He laid us as we lay at birth 
 On the cool flowery lap of earth, 
 Smiles broke from us and we had ease; 
 The hills were round us, and the breeze 
 Went o'er the sun-lit fields again ; 
 Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
 Our youth return'd ; for there was shed 
 On spirits that had long been dead, 
 Spirits dried up and closely furl'd, 
 The freshness of the early world." 
 
 No account of the forces that went to mold the 
 character of Matthew Arnold would be complete 
 which neglected the influence exerted upon him 
 by his father. In some respects the two were far 
 apart. Dr. Arnold, with all his genuine good- 
 ness, was something of a Philistine — so much so, 
 that some mocking critic characterized Matthew, 
 the deadly enemy of Philistia, as " David, the son 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 of Goliath." He was somewhat hard, somewhat 
 narrow, and not only a sincere believer in ortho- 
 dox Christianity, but one of its foremost cham- 
 pions against the new spirit of doubt. At the 
 first glance it is the unlikeness, rather than the 
 likeness, between father and son that is appar- 
 ent. But one need not be a profound student of 
 Matthew Arnold to recognize the paternal quali- 
 ties in his work and character. From his father 
 came his sincerity, his moral earnestness, his care 
 for conduct — in short, all the Hebraic elements of 
 his nature. With all his championship of Hellen- 
 ism Matthew Arnold was, one feels, rather a Jew 
 than a Greek, more at home with St. Paul than 
 with Socrates. Something more than mere 
 filial reverence inspires the noble memorial 
 verses written by his father's grave in Rugby 
 Chapel. There is spiritual sympathy as well as 
 profound admiration in the lines which tell of that 
 strength, "zealous, beneficent, firm." The elder 
 Arnold was to his son a glorious example of 
 the servants, or rather of the sons of God, who 
 save not themselves alone. In the hour of need, 
 he says : 
 
 " Of ) r our fainting, dispirited race, 
 Ye, like angels, appear, 
 Radiant with ardour divine ! 
 
 Languor is not in your heart, 
 Weakness is not in your word, 
 
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The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 Weariness not on your brow. 
 
 Ye alight in our van ! at your voice, 
 
 Panic, despair, flee away. 
 
 Ye fill up the gaps in our files, 
 Strengthen the wavering line, 
 Stablish, continue our march, 
 On, to the bound of the waste, 
 On, to the City of God." 
 
 Such were the influences under which the 
 young poet brought out, in 1 849, his first book of 
 verse, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems. 
 It fell, as has been said, still-born from the press. 
 The same fate, to be sure, has attended most 
 first volumes of verse, but few have deserved 
 it less. Browning and Tennyson are undoubtedly 
 greater poets than Arnold, but only a prophet 
 after the event would be able to discern more of 
 promise in the incoherent beauties of Paidine, or 
 in the somewhat thoughtless rimes and pictures of 
 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, than in this little volume, 
 while in actual performance it fairly beats them 
 out of the field. Setting aside the title poem, a 
 series of pictures loosely strung together in the 
 irregular rimeless metre that Arnold was so fond 
 of, we have here the splendid sonnet to Shake- 
 speare, the strong and finely finished Mycerinus y 
 the magic melodies of The New Sirens, and the 
 grave pathos of The Sick King in Bokhara. And 
 there are even finer things in the book. 
 
 (84) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 «— m^— — — uii.mi.im- i iimi ■iiiiiininiirmrmiiwinimn?imn¥TBin" ,l - i - l »" 1 —™ 
 
 The Forsaken Merman, for example, is a per- 
 manent addition to English literature. How good 
 it is may perhaps be best ascertained by a com- 
 parison with Tennyson's early poems, the Merman 
 and the Mermaid. It is hard to praise with discre- 
 tion the vivid clearness of its pictures, the haunting 
 music of its changing rhythms, and, best and rarest 
 of all, the passionate cry of a wild, immortal, yet 
 strangely human pathos. One, at least, of the 
 shorter lyrics in this volume shows Arnold for a 
 brief space under the influence of Shelley, and it 
 is to be regretted that he did not yield oftener to 
 the spell ; A Question is so purely Shelleyan 
 that it might almost be classed with some of 
 the minor songs of the master lyrist. But after 
 all Arnold at his best has a style of his own which 
 is more delightful than any faint Shelleyan echoes. 
 Of that style we need not attempt a definition ; an 
 example will serve our purpose better, and the 
 lovely and gracious words fairly tempt the pen 
 to transcribe them. 
 
 " Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow, 
 And faint the city gleams ; 
 Rare the lone pastoral huts — marvel not thou ! 
 The solemn peaks but to the stars are known, 
 But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams ; 
 Alone the sun arises, and alone 
 Spring the great streams." 
 
 Walter Bagehot once wrote an interesting and 
 suggestive essay on the pure, the ornate, and the 
 
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The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 grotesque styles in English poetry. Tennyson 
 serves him well for the ornate, some carefully 
 chosen passages of Browning furnish striking 
 specimens of the grotesque, and for examples of 
 the pure style he goes back to Wordsworth and to 
 Milton. But he need not have gone back so far, for 
 in this first work of Arnold we have, and not for 
 the last time, a specimen of the pure style almost at 
 its best. It is as classic as a statue by Praxiteles. 
 Not a word can be added, not a word can be altered, 
 the pictorial and musical qualities blend in perfect 
 harmony, and the grave music of the verse gives 
 fit utterance to the solemn beauty of the thought. 
 
 The last poem of the collection, though by no 
 means the most perfect, is perhaps the most 
 remarkable, and in many ways the most character- 
 istic, in the book. Resignation is the first poem 
 where the distinctive Arnoldian undertone of 
 grave and thoughtful melancholy vibrates through- 
 out. Here, too, we have in quintessence Arnold's 
 whole poetic philosophy ; the immutability of 
 nature and of her laws, the restless longing of the 
 heart of man, the vanity of this longing and of all 
 struggle to realize it, the duty of renunciation 
 and endurance, the aid which nature offers in the 
 effort to endure, and the final reward of renuncia- 
 tion in the attainment of "quiet, and a fearless 
 mind." It is not a very cheerful philosophy for a 
 young man of twenty-seven, but to Arnold, at all 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 times of his life, the world was not a cheerful, 
 though far from an unlovely, place. 
 
 " The mute turf we tread, 
 The solemn hills around us spread, 
 This stream which falls incessantly, 
 The strange-scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky, 
 If I might lend their life a voice, 
 Seem to bear rather than rejoice." 
 
 The characteristic notes and beauties of this 
 volume appear again and again in Arnold's later 
 poems. Arnold developed, indeed, and increased 
 his powers, but he remained essentially the same. 
 There is no such change in him as we find be- 
 tween the Browning of Pauline and the Browning 
 of The Ring and the Book, or the Tennyson of 
 Lilian or The Sea-Fairies and the Tennyson of 
 Rizpah or Vast?zess. 
 
 Arnold's second volume, Empedocles on Etna 
 and Other Poems, appeared in 1852, and was 
 hastily withdrawn from circulation by the author. 
 The reason for this appears to have been that he 
 could not bear to contemplate the title-piece in 
 print. "A situation," he said, "in which a con- 
 tinuous state of mental distress is prolonged, un- 
 relieved by incident, hope, or resistance, is in ac- 
 tual life painful, not tragic, and its representation 
 in poetry is painful also." This is no doubt true, 
 and, moreover, it must be confessed that Empedo- 
 cles as a drama, even as a closet drama, is quite 
 
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 impossible. But the poem may be regarded in 
 another light than as a drama, and all lovers 
 of true poetry owe deep gratitude to Robert 
 Browning who persuaded Arnold to reprint, in 
 1867, this long suppressed work. It contains in 
 the long monologue of the hero "the noblest ex- 
 position," to quote Swinburne's words, "of the 
 gospel of autarkeia, the creed of self-sufficience, 
 which sees for man no clearer or deeper duty 
 than that of intellectual self-reliance, self-depend- 
 ence, self-respect." Even those who reject this 
 gospel of self-sufficience as wholly inadequate may 
 appreciate the dignity of its ideas and the grave 
 beauty of the words in which they are presented. 
 Of the lovely group of songs put into the mouth 
 of Callicles there can be but one opinion — they 
 are flawless gems in the crown of English lyric 
 poetry. And their beauty is enhanced by the 
 perfect propriety of their setting. Arnold 
 loved to finish his longer poems with some spe- 
 cially fine bit of verse, not always very closely 
 connected with the main subject. The classical 
 example, of course, is the superb finale of Sohrab 
 and Rustimi ; but even that noble passage yields 
 in dramatic propriety to the last song of Callicles. 
 After the bitterness of human anguish, after the 
 flame and smoke of Etna, comes Apollo with his 
 choir, comes 
 
 " The night in her silence, 
 The stars in their calm." 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 Tristram and Iseitlt, next to Empedocles the 
 longest poem of this volume, is by no means the 
 best. It is Arnold's first attempt at narrative 
 poetry, and though he was more successful in this 
 field than in the drama, he cannot be called a 
 master in the art of telling a story. There are 
 many beautiful passages in the poem, chiefly 
 lyrical or descriptive, but it breaks down at the 
 very climax. Arnold had a strange deficiency of 
 ear, though, at his best, none of his contempora- 
 ries was master of a finer music, and in this poem 
 he chooses to embody the passionate parting 
 words of the ill-starred lovers in a jingling trochaic 
 metre that jars on every sense of the fitness of 
 things. 
 
 Iseidt 
 
 " Tristram, ah, for love of Heaven, speak kindly ! 
 What, I hear these bitter words from thee ? 
 Sick with grief I am, and faint with travel — 
 Take my hand — dear Tristram, look on me ! 
 
 Tristram. 
 I forgot, thou comest from thy voyage. — " 
 
 The truth is that Arnold, one of the least passion- 
 ate of English poets, simply could not conceive 
 such a situation as this, and his attempt to portray 
 what he had neither seen nor felt was fore-doomed 
 to failure. A passage in the third part of the poem 
 probably represents his own view of such a love 
 as Tristram and Iseult's. 
 
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 " I swear, it angers me to see 
 How this fool passion gulls men potently ; 
 Being, in truth, but a diseased unrest, 
 And an unnatural overheat at best." 
 
 That is a philosophic and, possibly, a correct 
 view ; but it is hardly capable of poetic treatment. 
 To do Arnold justice he seems to have realized 
 his own deficiencies in this matter. Love, which 
 plays so large a part in the poetry of Browning 
 and Tennyson, is almost entirely absent from his 
 verse. Its place is taken sometimes by tender 
 affection, oftener by hopeless longing. Never 
 after his failure in Tristram and Iseult did he 
 attempt to handle a great passion 
 
 Two of the most noteworthy poems of this 
 volume are the Memorial Verses and the Stanzas 
 in Memory of the Author of Obermann. Both 
 belong, as their titles show, to the group of 
 elegiac poems which go so far to establish Arnold's 
 rank as a poet. Something more must be said of 
 this group in the closing estimate of Arnold's 
 work. It is enough for the present to point out 
 that these two poems both for conception and 
 execution, for polished beauty of word and grave 
 dignity of thought, rank very high in the group to 
 which they belong. 
 
 Two other poems in this volume deserve more 
 than a passing notice. A Summer Night is, per- 
 haps, the very highest poetic expression of the 
 mingled despair and fortitude, the disgust with 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 the world and the relief to be found in the con- 
 templation of nature, which go to make up the 
 essential undertone of most of Arnold's work. 
 And the technical excellencies of the poem, as is 
 always the case when Arnold is possessed by his 
 theme, are the perfect reflection of the underlying 
 thought. The lovely moonlit night piece with 
 which the poem opens, the contrast between 
 the slave of life and the rebel, are equally fine in 
 thought and word, and the poem rises to its 
 fitting climax of supreme lyrical utterance in the 
 noble apostrophe to the heavens which forms its 
 close. 
 
 The poem known under the various titles of 
 To Marguerite — In Returning a Volume of Let- 
 ters, Isolation, and To Marguerite — Continued, is 
 the crowning flower of Arnold's poems of love. 
 And it is worth noting that the poem deals, not 
 with the rapture of possession, nor with the 
 unutterable sadness of remembered kisses after 
 death, but with that sense of the predestined soli- 
 tude of the soul which even love is unable to 
 overcome. The theme is the same as that of 
 Browning in Two in the Campagna, and nothing 
 can show more clearly the difference between the 
 character and art of the two great poets than 
 a comparison of the elder singer's strong and 
 vibrating emotion, full of the sense of infinite 
 passion and the pain of finite hearts, with the mel- 
 ancholy acceptance by the younger of the solemn 
 
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 laws under which "we mortal millions live alone." 
 From the point of view of pure poetry, at least, 
 the comparison does not turn out to Arnold's dis- 
 advantage ; the closing phrase, in which all the 
 depth, and bitterness, and sad dividing power of 
 the sea are caught up in three words, may chal- 
 lenge a place among the greatest single lines of 
 English poetry. 
 
 How any poet could have the heart to withdraw 
 such a volume from the public is inexplicable 
 except on the theory that he fell back in order to 
 make his entrance more effective when next he 
 appeared in the lists. The withdrawal, at any rate, 
 was short, for in the next year, 1853, Arnold put 
 forth another volume, omitting, indeed, Empedocles 
 and some other poems, but reprinting a fair selec- 
 tion from his earlier work, and adding several 
 new poems of great worth and beauty. 
 
 The longest and most pretentious of these is 
 Sohrab and Rustum. This is admittedly the best 
 of Arnold's narrative poems, and by some critics 
 it is ranked as the first of all his works. This, 
 however, is an opinion which seems to be based 
 on theory rather than on facts. Undoubtedly the 
 epic is the noblest form of poetry, and undoubt- 
 edly this is Arnold's nearest approach to epic 
 grandeur. But in art a success, even along lower 
 lines, outweighs an ambitious but unattaining 
 effort. And that Sohrab and Rustum, in spite 
 of its manifold beauties, its stately verse, its 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 noble imagery, and well-conducted story, does 
 not quite attain will be clear, it seems to me, 
 to anyone who compares it with the true epic 
 tone in ancient or modern verse, with the wrath 
 and sorrow of Achilles, with the love and ven- 
 geance of Kriemhild, with the glory of war and 
 loyalty that rings through the last great canto of 
 Marmion. The situation is one of the most pa- 
 thetic in literature ; but where is the thrill of vital 
 sympathy to make us feel it ? Where is the 
 divine creative power to put life into the stately 
 but shadowy figures of father and son caught in 
 the toils of Fate ? Sohrab and Rustum is a noble 
 poem — one that can be read and re-read with in- 
 creasing admiration. But it is admiration for the 
 chaste and polished art of the poet that we feel, 
 rather than the presence of the fierce and tragic 
 power that, in the true masters of the epic, grips 
 and carries us where it will. 
 
 At least two of the lyrics of this volume would 
 suffice to save a poet from complete forgetfulness : 
 Philomela, in which Arnold catches the passion, 
 as surely as Keats did the magic, of the nightin- 
 gale's song, and the wonderful Requiescat. Of 
 such a song as this last it is useless to speak. If 
 a reader cannot see its flawless perfection ; if he 
 cannot feel its tender beauty and solemn pathos, 
 culminating in one of the unforgetable Arnoldian 
 phrases, he is much to be pitied, but not to be 
 argued with. 
 
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 The Church of Brou, on the other hand, shares 
 with Tristram the distinction of being one of the 
 few uneven, one might almost say unsatisfactory, 
 pieces of Arnold's work. It was apparently writ- 
 ten some years before the publication of the vol- 
 ume, and its early date may account for the trivi- 
 ality of its first and the inadequacy of its second 
 part. But the close is in Arnold's best vein. 
 Here, as seldom in his verse, the tender note of 
 human affection vibrates through the soft repose- 
 ful beauty of the words. It is quite worth while 
 to read through the earlier parts for the shock of 
 pleased surprise that comes with the opening in- 
 vocation of the third, 
 
 " So rest, forever rest, O princely Pair." 
 
 And amazement gives way to a reverent thank- 
 fulness for such a precious gift of song, as we ap- 
 proach the noble climax and listen with the buried 
 lovers to the passage of the angel's wings, 
 
 " And on the lichen-crusted leads above 
 The rustle of the eternal rain of love." 
 
 The crowning glory of the whole volume is The 
 Scholar-Gipsy, but we may defer comment on 
 this poem till we can consider it along with its 
 companion piece, Thyrsis. 
 
 Two years later, in 1855, Arnold published a 
 second series of selections from his earlier poems, 
 adding to them only one short song of little value, 
 and the long narrative of Balder Dead. This 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 poem has had the good fortune to be praised by- 
 Mr. Henley, no mean judge of poetry and some- 
 what sparing of his praise. But one can hardly 
 agree with him that Balder Dead was "written in 
 Arnold's most fortunate hour." Whatever has 
 been said in praise of Sohrab and Rustum may be 
 repeated of this poem. But it has, if possible, even 
 less of life than its predecessor. All the world, 
 runs the old story, wept for Balder' s death ; but it 
 is hard to imagine that any human being was ever 
 moved to tears by Arnold's version of the strange, 
 sad tale. Its artificial beauties, "faultily faultless, 
 icily regular, splendidly null," leave most of us as 
 cold as the waste of snow that Hermod traversed 
 on his way to Hela's realm. 
 
 The year 1858 saw the appearance of the one 
 work of Arnold's which must be pronounced a 
 hopeless failure. Merope is an attempt to repro- 
 duce in English the old Greek drama. Imitations 
 are, as a rule, fore-doomed to failure, and of all 
 imitations that of the Greek drama in modern 
 English seems the most hopeless. It has been 
 attempted countless times, and there has been 
 but one approach to success in all the number, 
 Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. It is not worth 
 while in this place to discuss the reason for such 
 failure ; better to lay Merope aside and pass on to 
 Arnold's last book of verse. 
 
 This was the New Poems published in 1867, the 
 year in which he laid down his professorship 
 
 (95) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 of poetry at Oxford. The book falls naturally 
 into three parts — the sonnets, the lyrics rimed 
 and rimeless, and the elegies. Perhaps no single 
 one of the sonnets is quite the equal of the great 
 apostrophe to Shakespeare in the first volume, but 
 the group as a whole outranks its earlier fellows. 
 Several of them are particularly distinguished by 
 the depth and sincerity of the religious sentiment 
 which breathes through them — a sentiment which 
 shows a better, and essentially a truer, side of 
 Arnold than the reckless flippancy of many of his 
 controversial writings. 
 
 The lyrics of the collection are, with one excep- 
 tion, hardly up to the earlier standard. But that 
 exception is so excellent that it alone would save 
 the volume ; it is Dover Beach. Here once more 
 we have Arnold at his best, thought, word, and 
 rhythm blending in the perfect song. It is hard to 
 know what to praise most in the poem, the glorious 
 picture of the moonlight and the floodtide, the 
 "passionate interpretation of nature" which catches 
 in the tremulous cadence of the waves the eter- 
 nal note of sadness, or the famous simile of the 
 ebbing of the sea of faith. And besides all these 
 there is one supreme touch in this lyric which 
 gives it a unique place among all Arnold's 
 poems — the human cry with which the last stanza 
 opens, 
 
 " Ah, love, let us be true 
 To one another ! " 
 
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MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 Here for once the sad, proud consciousness of 
 isolation gives way to the sense of human sympa- 
 thy and comradeship in all disastrous fight. For 
 once we note in Arnold the presence of the idea 
 which the great symbolic painter of his day em- 
 bodied immortally in "Love and Life." 
 
 It is after all, however, the elegies which give 
 to this volume its distinctive note. Of these, 
 Heine s Grave, in spite of the fine and often 
 quoted passage on the weary Titan, is the least 
 satisfactory. It is written in the irregular rimeless 
 verse that had such a dangerous fascination for 
 Arnold. Rugby Chapel is in the same metre, but 
 here the poet is really possessed by his theme, 
 and the result is a very noble tribute to the 
 dead — noticeable among all of Arnold's elegies 
 for the explicit testimony it bears to his belief in 
 immortality. The Stanzas from Carnac and A 
 Southern Night are memorials to his brother, the 
 latter a very beautiful lament, flooded, like so 
 many of Arnold's poems, with moonlight, and 
 murmurous with the sound of the sea. Obermann 
 Once More and the Stanzas from the Grande 
 Chartreuse are naturally connected by their 
 theme, the lament for a dead faith. Obermann is 
 somewhat too long. The shadowy personage 
 who gives the poem its name discourses through 
 nine pages on the rise and fall of religion, on pres- 
 ent despair and hope for the future. The first 
 part of his speech, indeed, is already a classic ; 
 
 7M (97) 
 
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 everyone knows the famous stanzas that tell of 
 the hard Pagan world, the brooding East, the 
 miraculous conquests, and slow, reluctant death of 
 Christianity. But the remainder of the poem is 
 somewhat diffuse and contrasts unfavorably with 
 the terser, stronger close of the Obermann poem 
 of 1852. The Stanzas from the Grande Char- 
 treuse, however, are not open to the charge of dif- 
 fuseness. Indeed, it is hard to see what charge 
 the lover of pure and thoughtful poetry could 
 bring against them. We have in them the high- 
 est expression in the elegiac mood of the theme 
 that Arnold treated with supreme lyric power in 
 Dover Beach. They are a revelation of the poet's 
 own divided mind. 
 
 " Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born." 
 
 But they are something more than that. The 
 poem, as a whole, is a typical, one might almost 
 say the typical, utterance of the Middle Victorian 
 era, a period when rationalistic science seemed to 
 be carrying all before it. The calm assumption 
 that the Christian faith is only "a dead time's ex- 
 ploded dream " is by no means peculiar to Arnold. 
 It marks much, perhaps most, of the thought of 
 his day. What is peculiar to Arnold is his sin- 
 cere regret for the vanished past, his instinctive 
 repugnance to the hardness and loudness of the 
 new age, even though he believes that the age is 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 right. This attitude is disclosed even more plainly 
 in the remarkable poem, Bacchanalia, which is 
 also included in this volume. 
 
 And now we come to Thyrsis, with its prede- 
 cessor, The Scholar- Gipsy. Here, it would seem, 
 if anywhere, we have the noblest work of Arnold. 
 Serene beauty of thought, tender melancholy of 
 mood, perfect fitness of expression, and harmo- 
 nious rhythm, characterize both these poems and 
 characterize them throughout. There are no lang- 
 uors, no depressions, no passages of prose thrown 
 into metrical form. The famous simile with which 
 The Scholar-Gipsy closes is far from being the 
 "purple patch" it has irreverently been styled. 
 One does not sew a purple patch upon a robe of 
 Tyrian dye ; and, fine as the closing stanzas are, 
 they yield in excellence to some of the earlier pic- 
 tures of English life and scenery. Two beauties 
 we may note common to both these poems ; 
 Arnold's loving memories of his alma mater, 
 and his intense and almost sensuous delight in 
 aspects of nature inseparably blended with those 
 memories. Arnold has apostrophized Oxford in 
 a famous prose passage, but all that he says there 
 is packed into one line of Thyrsis, 
 
 "That sweet city with her dreaming spires." 
 
 The loving sympathy with nature apparent in al- 
 most every line of these poems it is impossible to 
 praise too highly. The picture in Thyrsis of the 
 
 .oFC. ( 99> 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 storm-vexed trees and the fallen chestnut flowers 
 in an English garden is a masterpiece of poetic 
 word-painting. Hardly less delightful is the pic- 
 ture of the moonlit ferry on the stripling Thames 
 in The Scholar- Gipsy, or that in which the line of 
 festal light in Christ-Church hall shines through the 
 blinding snow-storm on the Cumner hills. And for 
 once in Arnold's work the old opposition between 
 the restless, turbulent soul of man and the sweet 
 calm of nature disappears. In these two poems 
 nature and man blend together in a perfect 
 harmony. 
 
 Poetry like this tempts one to linger over it. 
 There is much that might be said. It is hard to 
 pass over without mention Arnold's striking suc- 
 cess in adapting the conventions of the antique 
 pastoral elegy to a lament for a modern poet. 
 Something, too, one would like to say on the 
 gleam of hope that lights the close of Thyrsis, 
 faint, indeed, when compared with the sun-burst 
 that exalts and glorifies the final stanzas of 
 Adonais, but not without a tender beauty of its 
 own. But all one can do is to recommend these 
 poems to every lover of pure poetry. They will 
 serve as an unfailing test of a reader's power to 
 appreciate poetry for its own sake. 
 
 Westminster Abbey, the elegy on Arnold's 
 school friend, Dean Stanley, is a noble poem, but 
 after Thyrsis it seems a little cold, a little artifi- 
 cial. The group of poems on the household pets, 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 Geist, Matthias, and Kaiser, deserves, at least, a 
 passing mention. Here a very different Arnold 
 is revealed from the Arnold of the poems or the 
 essays. It is the Arnold whom only his intimates 
 knew — gentle, affectionate, playful, and not with- 
 out a trace of kindly humor, the centre of a pleas- 
 ant company of cats and canaries, and children 
 and dachshunds. They are not without true poetic 
 merit, these little poems ; but their chief value 
 lies in the revelation which they make of a new 
 and more genial side of the poet's mind and life. 
 
 Some of the characteristic beauties and defects 
 of Arnold have been revealed by this critical ex- 
 amination of his successive volumes. But a brief 
 summary may serve to gather up the results so 
 far attained and to fix them in the reader's mind. 
 
 In the first place, it is easy to say what Arnold 
 was not. He was not a great narrative poet. No 
 need, after all, to compare him with the great 
 masters of the epic — his own contemporaries sur- 
 passed him again and again. Matthew Arnold 
 could no more have written How They Brought 
 the Good News from Ghent to Aix or The Revenge 
 than he could have written the Iliad or Paradise 
 Lost; this in spite of his theory that "the eternal 
 objects of poetry are actions — human actions." 
 But Arnold, like his master, Wordsworth, achieves 
 the best results when he departs from theory and 
 surrenders himself to instinct and inspiration. He 
 was not himself a man of action, nor was he capa- 
 
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The Booklovers Reading Clur 
 
 ble of sympathizing with action, except theoreti- 
 cally. He disliked and distrusted nearly all the 
 great actors in the social and political movements 
 of his day. Small wonder, then, that his narrative 
 poems interest us by their beauty of form, by 
 their lyrical, descriptive, or meditative passages — 
 by anything, in short, rather than by the human 
 actions which they portray. 
 
 Again Arnold is not a dramatic poet. We may 
 waive the fact that he never succeeded in writing 
 a successful play. No more did Browning or 
 Tennyson. But Arnold cannot lay claim even to 
 the dramatic qualities which Browning and Ten- 
 nyson possessed. We have seen that he could not 
 tell a satisfactory story, but it is even plainer that 
 he could not create a character at all. As we re- 
 view Arnold's work we realize, with a little touch 
 of surprise, the almost entire absence from it of 
 men and women. The unreality of Sohrab and 
 of Rustum has been already pointed out ; the 
 gods in Balder are even more remote and life- 
 less ; Obermann is a ghost, the Scholar-Gipsy a 
 myth, even the poet's nearest friend becomes the 
 conventional dead shepherd of pastoral elegy. 
 And the women ! Marguerite is a dainty lady who 
 allows herself to be kissed and abandoned, neither 
 with extreme concern ; Fausta and Eugenia are 
 mere nomina, umbrcz. The truth is that Arnold is 
 one of the least objective of English poets. Byron's 
 lack of objectivity is a commonplace of criticism ;. 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 but Byron had, at least, the gift of projecting his 
 own great personality into the figures of his 
 poems. Harold, Manfred, and Juan are, it may 
 be, mere embodiments of various aspects of their 
 creator, but they share something of his fiery life, 
 and so long as the personality of Byron thrills 
 and fascinates, so long will these characters en- 
 dure — and that will be as long as English poetry 
 is read. But is there any character in Arnold's 
 poetry which can be identified with Arnold ? 
 
 On the technical side of poetry there are few 
 faults to be found with Arnold's work, yet even 
 here the adversary may advance something 
 against him. He lacked almost entirely the rich- 
 ness of color, the delight in lovely words for their 
 own sake and for the sake of their associations, 
 which makes so many lines of Tennyson a won- 
 der and a wild delight. He lacked almost entirely 
 the sense, to use his own fine phrase, of that 
 natural magic, by which at times Shakespeare 
 seems to transport us in the twinkling of an eye 
 from this dull world to fairyland. Worst of all, he 
 lacked the true poetic ear. This led him to per- 
 petrate such rimes as "ranging" and "hanging," 
 as "scorn " and "faun ; " at times to write, under 
 the delusion that it was poetry, such a passage as 
 the following, which, printed as prose, reads : 
 
 " Thou standest smiling down on me ! 
 Thy right arm, leaned up against the col- 
 umn there, props thy soft cheek ; thy left 
 
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The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 holds, hanging loosely, the deep cup, ivy- 
 cinctured, I held but now." 
 
 It would be an interesting and not uninstructive ex- 
 ercise for the student of poetry to attempt the scan- 
 sion of these lines, or even their arrangement in 
 metrical form. Nor was this dulness of ear a 
 fault which Arnold outgrew. Some of his most 
 prosaic and unrhythmical passages occur in his last 
 volume of verse. 
 
 And now, having cleared the field, we may pro- 
 ceed to the more pleasing and gracious task of 
 defining what Arnold was, and of pointing out his 
 peculiar poetic characteristics. He was, undoubt- 
 edly, a great didactic and critical, a great elegiac 
 and lyric poet. Didactic, not in the old-fashioned 
 sense of Pope and Johnson, nor even in the often 
 too obtrusive fashion of Wordsworth. But he had 
 a distinct philosophy of life, and this philosophy 
 interpenetrates and informs his poetry. It does 
 not harm it. Arnold, in poetry at least, was not 
 one of those preachers who are forever dragging 
 in the moral. He lived in the world of ideas, 
 as some poets, Mr. Kipling, for example, live in 
 the world of actions. The desire to impart ideas 
 roused him to a point as near that of passionate 
 poetic sympathy as he ever approached. And, 
 accordingly, some of his very best poetry appears 
 in these efforts to communicate ideas which to 
 him were vital and salutary truths. We need 
 only turn to the later sonnets, to Resignation, A 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 Summer Night, and the Stanzas from the Grande 
 Chartreuse to realize the truth of this statement. 
 
 Arnold is, perhaps, the first and greatest of our 
 critical poets. He once defined poetry as being 
 essentially a criticism of life. If poetry were this 
 and this alone, Arnold would be the greatest of 
 English poets. Poetry, of course, is infinitely 
 more than this, even if we give to the definition of 
 criticism Arnold's wide extension of meaning. 
 But whether we take criticism in this larger sense 
 as a study of life with the purpose of distinguish- 
 ing between the false and the true, or in the cus- 
 tomary narrower sense, as the effort to ascertain 
 the predominating ideas and salient characteris- 
 tics of a writer, Arnold's poetry along these lines 
 stands almost unrivaled. For a criticism of life, 
 for a criticism of literature, couched in grave yet 
 lovely and harmonious verse such as abounds in 
 the monologue of Empedocles, in the memorial 
 verses for Wordsworth, and in the Obermann 
 poems, we may go far afield before we find his fit- 
 ting mate. 
 
 Arnold's elegies alone would assign him a place 
 among the greater Victorian poets. One critic, 
 indeed, has gone so far as to call him the greatest 
 elegiac poet in English literature. This seems a 
 bold saying, for surely Arnold has never reached 
 such heights as Milton in Lycidas, Shelley in 
 Ado7iais, and Tennyson in In Memoriam. But 
 quantity counts for something also in determining 
 
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 a poet's work, provided always that it is quantity 
 which does not fall below a certain mark of 
 excellence. And no other English poet has given 
 us so many grave and tender elegies as the 
 author of Thy r sis y the Memorial Verses, A South- 
 ern Night, Rugby Chapel, Heine s Grave, the 
 Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, and the two 
 poems in memory of the author of Obermann. 
 The mere roll-call of these titles is enough to 
 confirm those who know their Arnold in the 
 belief that he ranks among the very first of the 
 English poets of sorrow and melancholy medita- 
 tion. He was, indeed, well fitted by nature to be 
 an elegiac poet. A famous phrase in Resignation 
 speaks of the poet's "sad lucidity of soul." This 
 quality was eminently characteristic of Arnold him- 
 self, and it distinguishes and elevates all his elegies. 
 Sad an elegy must be by its very nature ; but it 
 must also be lucid. Wild and wandering cries, 
 however poignant and pathetic they may be, are 
 out of place in this form of poetry. Unless a 
 poet can so far master his sorrow as to look 
 through it and above it, he will prove as incapa- 
 ble of embodying it in the somewhat conventional 
 forms of the elegy, as he will prove incapable of 
 filling these forms with true and sympathetic 
 poetry if his sorrow be not genuine and deeply 
 felt. From this point of view it might be main- 
 tained, and not altogether without reason, that 
 Thyrsis is the most perfect elegy in English. 
 
 1106) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 And when to this trait of sad lucidity we add the 
 beauty of the diction, imbued, as it is, with a richness 
 of color very rare in Arnold's work, and the melo- 
 dious rhythm of the echoing lines, the reasons for 
 such a preference seem weighty indeed. But the 
 ranking of poets or poems is a dangerous, and, 
 as a matter of fact, an uncritical performance. It 
 is enough to demonstrate what one poet has done 
 without attempting to place him above or below 
 his fellows. And of the beauty and merit of Ar- 
 nold's elegies there can be no doubt in the mind 
 of any student of English poetry. 
 
 It is another matter with his lyrical poems. 
 Arnold is not, as a rule, reckoned one of the great 
 singers of our language. Yet I believe the time 
 will come when critics will not only recognize in 
 Arnold's lyrics the loveliest flowers in his garden 
 of verse, but will pronounce any anthology of Eng- 
 lish lyrics incomplete which does not contain 
 more than one or two of these priceless blossoms 
 of pure poetry. Listen for a moment to the 
 lyrical cry that rings through Requiescat, Dover 
 Beach, In Utrumque Paratus, the songs of Calli- 
 cles, the second Isolation, and consider whether 
 we have not here a note as rare as it is beautiful. 
 Tennyson alone, it seems to me, among Victorian 
 poets, can equal these effects, and even Tennyson 
 lacks at times the purity, the simplicity, and 
 the directness which characterize the best of 
 Arnold's lyrics. Browning has many passages 
 
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The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 and some whole poems instinct with true lyrical 
 feeling, but as a rule Browning is not subjective 
 enough in mood or simple enough in expression 
 to be a great lyric poet. On the other hand, Ar- 
 nold's profound subjectivity, his intense sensi- 
 bility of his own moods, and his ability to give 
 them expression in language so free from taint or 
 flaw that it seems the direct utterance of the soul, 
 were natural qualifications for a place among the 
 master-lyrists of our language higher than has yet 
 been awarded to him — perhaps higher than he 
 ever in reality attained. 
 
 One or two characteristics are yet to be noticed 
 before we close this study. It is impossible to do 
 justice to Arnold without taking into account the 
 uniform excellence of his work. How much is 
 there of some of our greatest poets, Wordsworth, 
 for instance, and Browning, that might, with no 
 loss to their fame, be omitted altogether from a 
 consideration of their work ? But if we set aside 
 the unfortunate Merope, and one or two shorter 
 poems, what is there in Arnold that can be 
 omitted without positive loss ? One can under- 
 stand a meaning beneath Arnold's laughing 
 answer, when asked to make a selection from his 
 poems, "I would like to choose them all." 
 
 Closely connected with this characteristic is the 
 uniform excellence of the single poems. Some- 
 times, but rarely, we find purple patches upon a 
 mantle of hodden-gray ; but, as a rule, each poem 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 maintains throughout an even excellence of style. 
 And at its highest how pure and noble is this style 
 of Arnold's ! He said of Wordsworth that, at his 
 best, Nature seemed to take the pen and write for 
 him. No higher praise could be given to a poet, 
 and no truer praise to much of Arnold's own 
 poetry. Doubtless this instinct for chastely finished 
 work, which preserved him alike from the too fre- 
 quent redundancies of Tennyson, and the too 
 startling eccentricities of Browning, was due to 
 the influence of his classical studies, but it is none 
 the less notable and worthy of high praise. 
 
 One specially characteristic feature of Arnold's 
 poetry is his treatment of nature. Since Cowper's 
 day, all great English poets have been nature 
 lovers. Even Browning, whose stress lay upon 
 the incidents in the development of the soul of 
 man, illumines his dramatic poetry with sudden 
 pictures of the external world that show him to 
 have been a penetrating observer and a passionate 
 lover of nature. The poetry of Tennyson, the 
 great master of the idyllic school, is steeped 
 in a sensuous enjoyment of nature in all her 
 aspects. In Arnold, too, there is this ever-present 
 love of nature, but with a difference. He does 
 not, like Browning, turn to nature to illustrate 
 the life of man, nor does he, like Tennyson, 
 steep his senses in nature for sheer delight in her 
 visible beauty. His relation to the natural world 
 is like that of Wordsworth, a moral relation. 
 
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 But here, again, we must distinguish. Words- 
 worth sought in nature the inspiration without 
 which man's life was stale, flat, unprofitable. To 
 him the universe was governed by laws, not only- 
 mighty, but everlastingly righteous. The man 
 who could penetrate through the superficial aspects 
 of the visible world to grasp these laws, and who, 
 having grasped them, could shape his own life in 
 accordance with them, had learned, in Words- 
 worth's judgment, the secret of life. Arnold, on 
 the other hand, draws a sharp distinction between 
 man and nature. At times, even, as in the son- 
 net, In Harmony with Nature, he contrasts the 
 two as opposing and almost hostile forces ; 
 
 " Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood ; 
 Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore." 
 
 This, to be sure, is an unusual view with Ar- 
 nold. But it is only an exaggeration of his con- 
 stantly maintained distinction between the world 
 of natural phenomena and the world of man's life 
 and thought. In one of his most thoughtful 
 poems, Morality, he represents nature as admir- 
 ing and applauding "the divine strife," "the se- 
 vere earnest air" of man. As a rule, however, 
 he conceives of nature as apart from and indiffer- 
 ent to man ; 
 
 "The world which was ere I was born, 
 The world which lasts when I am dead ; 
 
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The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 Which never was the friend of one, 
 Nor promised love it could not give, 
 But lit for all its generous sun, 
 And lived itself, and made us live." 
 
 Yet Arnold is not indifferent to nature because 
 nature is indifferent to him. On the contrary he 
 finds in the contemplation of nature the attain- 
 ment, temporary to be sure, but still the attain- 
 ment of what with all his soul he most desires — 
 calm. And hence it comes that he turns again 
 and again to the more tranquil and soothing as- 
 pects of the world about him, to the peaceful 
 beauty of the English country-side, to the quiet 
 flow of a great river towards its final home, and, 
 most of all, to 
 
 "The night in her silence, 
 The stars in their calm." 
 
 It has been said that Arnold regarded nature 
 as a sedative, an anodyne. Such a statement is 
 one of the half-truths of criticism which, while not 
 without a basis of fact, are responsible in the end 
 for a wholly wrong impression. It is true that 
 Arnold turns with a profound sense of relief from 
 the weariness, the fever, and the fret of human life 
 to the calm, untroubled world of nature. But he 
 by no means used nature as a drug to deaden his 
 senses. The contemplation of nature was to him 
 rather a bath that at once cleansed him from the 
 dust and stains of conflict, and sent him out 
 
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The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 refreshed and strengthened to face the world 
 again. It is worth recalling the fact that Arnold 
 was a very hard working man. By far the greater 
 part of his poetry was composed during the 
 twenty years that he served as an inspector of 
 British schools, hurrying from town to town, for 
 long years without a resting-place that he could 
 call his home, constantly engaged in the mind and 
 soul destroying task of reading examination pa- 
 pers, and fighting, like Paul at Ephesus, against the 
 wild beasts of English ignorance, obstinacy, and 
 Philistinism. It is no wonder that he turned from 
 such a battle to seek the consolations of nature. 
 The wonderful and laudable thing is that he al- 
 ways went back to the battle again. 
 
 And this brings us to the last and noblest char- 
 acteristic of Arnold's poetry ; its essentially manly 
 tone and temper. Arnold has not the strong and 
 happy optimism of Browning nor the deeply emo- 
 tional hopefulness of Tennyson. More a child of 
 his age than either of these great contemporaries, 
 he reflected, as neither of them did, the prevailing 
 spirit of his time. It is for this that superficial 
 critics call him a poet of doubt and despair. Of 
 doubt he is in a sense a poet, inasmuch as he 
 gives utterance to the thought of his age, but 
 never of despair. The vigorous teachers of his 
 youth — Goethe, Wordsworth, his own father — for- 
 bade such mental cowardice. And Arnold was at 
 heart a deeply religious nature, not a mystic, not 
 
 (112) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 an enthusiast, but one whose religion was em- 
 braced in the word, conduct. If he laid aside 
 much of the armor of faith worn by his ancestors, 
 it was only to fight more freely in the lighter 
 gear. 
 
 " Hath man no second life ? — Pitch this one high ! 
 Sits there no judge in Heaven, our sin to see ? — 
 More strictly, then, the inward judge obey ! 
 Was Christ a man like us ? Ah ! let us try 
 If we then, too, can be such men as he ! " 
 
 On the whole, and in spite of occasional traces 
 of weakness, the dominant note of Arnold's poetry 
 is one of steadfast, almost stoical, endurance of 
 present evils, not without gleams of hope in a 
 future deliverance, 
 
 " Still nursing the unconquerable hope, 
 Still clutching the inviolable shade." 
 
 Like Tennyson he trusted that somehow good 
 would be the final goal of ill. But unlike 
 Tennyson he was not content to rest in a vague 
 " somehow." The goal, he held, must be attained 
 by man's own conscious effort ; and to Arnold's 
 mind the task, though attended by disheartening 
 difficulties, was not impossible. In lines which 
 may be regarded as closing his poetic career, he 
 pictures the typical figure of an age of doubt and 
 despair prophesying the coming of a new and 
 better day. 
 
 8m (113) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 " What though there still need effort, strife ? 
 Though much be still unwon ? 
 Yet warm it mounts, the hour of life ! 
 Death's frozen hour is done ! 
 
 The world's great order dawns in sheen, 
 After long darkness rude, 
 Divinelier imaged, clearer seen, 
 With happier zeal pursued." 
 
 Arnold himself found salvation in a gospel of 
 morality touched by the emotion of poetry, and he 
 looked forward to a time when all the world 
 would listen to this gospel and find in it 
 
 "One common wave of thought and joy 
 Lifting mankind again." 
 
 That his creed seems heterodox to many, perhaps 
 to most, in our day as in his own, does not alter 
 the fact that he believed in it as a means 
 of escape from the deadening influences of the 
 world, and that so believing he sorrowed not as 
 one that has no hope. It is not what he believed, 
 but the fact that he believed, that constitutes the 
 moral and spiritual value of Arnold's work. 
 
 Enough has been said to justify the assertion 
 that Matthew Arnold may justly claim a place 
 among the greater Victorian poets — if hardly the 
 equal of Tennyson or Browning, yet in the 
 same class with them. Indeed it seems impossi- 
 ble not to believe that a poet of such grace and 
 purity, of such high artistic ideals and achieve- 
 
 (114) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 ments, of such moral dignity and manly fortitude, 
 will not be recognized more and more clearly 
 with the years that make impartial judgment pos- 
 sible as one of the great masters in the broad and 
 lovely realm of English poetry. 
 
 <»5) 
 
Critical Comment 
 
 (ii?) 
 
Critical Comment 
 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 Frederic Harrison 
 
 That which in England is conveniently described 
 as the Victorian Age of literature has a character 
 of its own, at once brilliant, diverse, and complex. 
 It is an age peculiarly difficult to label in a phrase ; 
 but its copious and versatile gifts will make it 
 memorable in the history of modern civilisation. 
 The Victorian Age, it is true, has no Shakespeare 
 or Milton, no Bacon or Hume, no Fielding or 
 Scott — no supreme master in poetry, philosophy, 
 or romance, whose work is incorporated with the 
 thought of the world, who is destined to form 
 epochs and to endure for centuries. Its genius is 
 more scientific than literary, more historical than 
 dramatic, greater in discovery than in abstract 
 thought. 
 
 In lyric poetry and in romance our age has 
 names second only to the greatest ; its researches 
 into nature and history are at least equal to those 
 of any previous epoch ; and if it has not many 
 great philosophers, it has developed the latest, 
 most arduous, most important of all the sciences. 
 This is the age of Sociology ; its central achieve- 
 ment has been the revelation of social laws. This 
 social aspect of thought colors the poetry, the 
 romance, the literature, the art, and the philosophy 
 
 ("9) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Clus 
 
 of the Victorian Age. Literature has been the 
 gainer thereby in originality and in force. It has 
 been the loser in symmetry, in dignity, in grace. 
 
 TENNYSON 
 
 Richard Holt Hutton 
 I suppose it is in some respects this lavish 
 strength of what may be called the bodily element 
 in poetry, as distinguished from the spiritual life 
 and germ of it, which has given Lord Tennyson 
 at once his delight in great variety and richness 
 of materials, and his profound reverence for the 
 principle of spiritual order which can alone im- 
 press unity and purpose on the tropical luxuriance 
 of natural gifts. It is obvious, for instance, that 
 even in relation to natural scenery, what his poet- 
 ical faculty delights in most are rich, luxuriant 
 landscapes in which either Nature or man has ac- 
 cumulated a lavish variety of effects. There is 
 nothing of Wordsworth's passion for the bare, 
 wild scenery of the rugged North in his poems. 
 For one picture of wild and barren grandeur like 
 the first of the two following in The Palace of Art, 
 there are at least fifty variations on the last, in his 
 various poems : 
 
 " And one, a foreground black with stones and slags, 
 Beyond, a line of heights, and higher 
 All barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags, 
 And highest, snow and fire. 
 
 (120) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 And one, an English home — gray twilight pour'd 
 
 On dewy pastures, dewy trees, 
 Softer than sleep— all things in order stored, 
 
 A haunt of ancient Peace." 
 
 It is in the scenery of the mill, the garden, the 
 chase, the down, the rich pastures, the harvest- 
 field, the palace pleasure grounds, the Lord of 
 Burleigh's fair domains, the luxuriant sylvan 
 beauty bearing testimony to the careful hand of 
 man, "the summer crisp with shining woods, "that 
 Tennyson most delights. If he strays to rarer 
 scenes it is almost always in search of richer and 
 more luxuriant loveliness, like the tropical splen- 
 dours of Enoch Arden and the enervating skies 
 which cheated the Lotos-Eaters of their longing 
 for home. There is always complexity in the 
 beauty which fascinates Lord Tennyson most. 
 
 And with the love of complexity comes, as a 
 matter of course, in a born artist the love of the 
 ordering faculty which can give unity and harmony 
 to complexity of detail. Measure and order are 
 for Tennyson of the very essence of beauty. His 
 strong- fascination for the Arthurian legends re- 
 suits no doubt from the mixture, in the moral 
 materials of the age of chivalry, of exuberant 
 stateliness and rich polish with the imperious need 
 for spiritual order to control the dangerous ele- 
 ments of the period. His Arthurian epic is a 
 great attempt to depict the infusion of a soul into 
 a chaos of stately passions. Even in relation to 
 
 (121) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Clu3 
 
 modern politics you always see the same bias, a 
 love of rich constitutional traditions welded to- 
 gether and ruled by wise forethought and temper- 
 ate judgment. He cannot endure either spas- 
 modic violence on the one hand, or bald simplicity 
 on the other. What he loves is a land 
 
 " Where Freedom broadens slowly down 
 From precedent to precedent." 
 
 In In Memoriam he goes out of his way to 
 condemn French political anarchy — 
 
 "The schoolboy heat, 
 The blind hysterics of the Celt — " 
 
 and to throw scorn on the "red fool-fury of the 
 Seine." Still more curious is the parenthetic 
 question, interpolated almost angrily, in the open- 
 ing of an exquisite love poem, Love and Duty : — 
 
 " O shall the braggart shout 
 For some blind glimpse of freedom, work itself 
 Through madness, hated by the wise, to law, 
 System, and empire ?" 
 
 — as if he grudged revolutionary energy even its 
 occasional success. Never was any cry more 
 absurd than the cry made against Mated for the 
 sympathy it was supposed to show with hysterical 
 passion. What it was meant to be, and what it 
 was, though inadequately — the failure being due, 
 not to sympathy with hysterics, but to the zeal 
 
 (122) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 with which Tennyson strove to caricature hys- 
 terics — was an exposure of hysterics. The love 
 of measure and order is as visible in Tennyson's 
 pictures of character as in every other aspect of 
 his poetry. His Si. Simeon Stylites is his hostile 
 picture of the fanatic, just as his Ulysses is his 
 friendly picture of the insatiable craving for 
 new experience, enterprise, and adventure, when 
 under the control of a luminous reason and a self- 
 controlled will. 
 
 BROWNING 
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne 
 The charge of obscurity is perhaps of all charges 
 the likeliest to impair the fame or to imperil the 
 success of a rising or an established poet. It is as 
 often misapplied by hasty or ignorant criticism as 
 any other on the roll of accusations ; and was 
 never misapplied more persistently and perversely 
 than to an eminent writer of our own time. The 
 difficulty found by many in certain of Mr. Brown- 
 ing's works arises from a quality the very reverse 
 of that which produces obscurity properly so 
 called. Obscurity is the natural product of turbid 
 forces and confused ideas ; of a feeble and clouded 
 or of a vigorous but unfixed and chaotic intellect. 
 Now, if there is any great quality more 
 perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intel- 
 lect it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, 
 
 («3) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 his sureness and intensity of perception, his 
 rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge 
 him with obscurity is about as accurate as to call 
 Lynceus purblind or complain of the sluggish 
 action of the telegraphic wire. He is something 
 too much the reverse of obscure ; he is too brill- 
 iant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready 
 writer to follow with any certainty the track of 
 an intelligence which moves with such incessant 
 rapidity, or even to realize with what spider-like 
 swiftness and sagacity his building spirit leaps 
 and lightens to and fro and backward and forward 
 as it lives along the animated line of its labor, 
 springs from thread to thread and darts from cen- 
 tre to circumference of the glittering and quiver- 
 ing web of living thought woven from the inex- 
 haustible stores of his perception and kindled from 
 the inexhaustible fire of his imagination. He 
 never thinks but at full speed ; and the rate of his 
 thought is to that of another man's as the speed of 
 a railway to that of a wagon or the speed of a tele- 
 graph to that of a railway. It is hopeless to 
 enjoy the charm or to apprehend the gist of his 
 writings except with a mind thoroughly alert, an 
 attention awake at all points, a spirit open and 
 ready to be kindled by the contact of the writer's. 
 To do justice to any book which deserves any 
 other sort of justice than that of the fire or the 
 waste paper basket, it is necessary to read it in 
 the fit frame of mind ; and the proper mood in 
 
 (124) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 which to study for the first time a book of Mr. 
 Browning's is the freshest, clearest, most active 
 mood of the mind in its brightest and keenest 
 hours of work. . . . The action of so bright 
 and swift a spirit gives insight as it were to the 
 eyes and wings to the feet of our own ; the read- 
 er's apprehension takes fire from the writer's, and 
 he catches from a subtler and more active mind 
 the infection of spiritual interest ; so that any 
 candid and clear-headed student finds himself 
 able to follow for the time in fancy the lead of 
 such a thinker with equal satisfaction on any 
 course of thought or argument ; when he sets 
 himself to refute Renan through the dying lips of 
 St. John or to try conclusions with Strauss. in his 
 own person, and when he flashes at once the 
 whole force of his illumination full upon the 
 inmost thought and mind of the most infamous 
 criminal, a Guido Franceschini or a Louis Bona- 
 parte, compelling the black and obscene abyss of 
 such a spirit to yield up at last the secret of its 
 profoundest sophistries, and let forth the serpent 
 of a soul that lies coiled under the most intricate 
 and supple reasonings of self-justified and self- 
 conscious crime. And thanks to this very quality 
 of vivid spiritual illumination, we are able to see 
 by the light of the author's mind without being 
 compelled to see with his eyes, or with the eyes 
 of the living mask which he assumes for his 
 momentary impersonation of saint or sophist, 
 
 ('25) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 philosopher or malefactor ; without accepting one 
 conclusion, conceding one point, or condoning 
 one crime. It is evident that to produce any- 
 such effect requires above all things brightness 
 and decision as well as subtlety and pliancy of 
 genius ; and this is the supreme gift and distinc- 
 tive faculty of Mr. Browning's mind. 
 
 ARNOLD 
 
 Matthew Arnold 
 My poems represent, on the whole, the main 
 movement of mind of the last quarter of a cen- 
 tury ; and thus they will probably have their day 
 as people become conscious to themselves of 
 what that movement of mind is, and interested in 
 the literary productions that reflect it. It might be 
 fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment 
 than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and 
 abundance than Browning ; yet because I have, 
 perhaps, more of a fusion of the two than either 
 of them, and have more regularly applied that 
 fusion to the main line of modern development, I 
 am likely enough to have my turn as they have 
 had theirs. 
 
 (126) 
 
TYPICAL POEMS 
 
 TENNYSON 
 
 The arrangement is chronological, and by reading the poems in 
 the order given some idea may be gained of the immense growth 
 of the poet's mind and the steady perfection of his art in breadth 
 and freedom. 
 
 Mariana 
 
 Recollections of the Arabian Nights 
 
 The Lady of Shalott 
 
 GEnone 
 
 The Palace of Art 
 
 The Lotos-Eaters 
 
 A Dream of Fair Women 
 
 The Two Voices 
 
 Dora 
 
 The Gardener s Daughter 
 
 Ulysses 
 
 Locksley Hall 
 
 Songs from The Princess 
 
 In Memoriam 
 
 Maud 
 
 Elaine 
 
 Guinevere 
 
 The Passing of Arthur 
 
 Northern Farmer — Old Style 
 
 The Revenge 
 
 Rizpah 
 
 Despair 
 
 The Ancient Sage 
 
 Locksley Hall Sixty Years After 
 
 (127) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 Vastness 
 
 Merlin and the Gleam 
 Crossing the Bar 
 Akbars Dream 
 
 BROWNING 
 
 The arrangement here is also chronological. 
 
 Johannes Agricola in Meditation 
 
 Pippa Passes 
 
 Cavalier Tunes 
 
 My Last Duchess 
 
 hi a Gondola 
 
 The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint 
 
 Praxed 1 s Church 
 The Lost Leader 
 Home- Thoughts, from Abroad 
 Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day 
 Saul 
 
 Evelyn Hope 
 By the Fireside 
 An Epistle of Karshish, the Arab 
 
 Physician 
 " Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' 
 The Statue and the Bust 
 The Last Ride Together 
 Andrea del Sarto 
 Holy- Cross Day 
 The Guardian- 
 Cleon 
 One Word More 
 
 (u£ 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 Too Late 
 Abt Vogler 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra 
 Caliban upon Setebos 
 Confessions 
 Prospice 
 Apparent Failure 
 
 From The Ri?ig and the Book 
 
 Giuseppe Caponsacchi 
 
 Pompilia 
 
 The Pope 
 
 From Fifine at the Fair 
 
 Amphibian 
 
 The Householder 
 
 Pheidippides 
 
 Halbert and Hob 
 
 Never the Time and the Place 
 
 Summum Bonum 
 
 A Pearl, A Girl 
 
 Epilogue to Asolando 
 
 ARNOLD 
 
 The arrangement, except in the case of the sonnets, is chrono- 
 logical. 
 
 Sonnets — 
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 East London 
 
 The Better Part 
 
 The Good ShepJierd with the Kid 
 Mycerinus 
 
 9 m (129) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 The Church of Brou (at least Part in) 
 
 Requiescat 
 
 Youth and Calm 
 
 The New Sirens 
 
 Resignation 
 
 SoJirab and Rustwn 
 
 The Sick King in Bokhara 
 
 Tristram and Iseult (at least parts i and in) 
 
 The Rorsaken Mer?nan 
 
 Switzeidand 
 
 Raded Leaves 
 
 Dover Beach 
 
 The Last Word 
 
 Self- Dependence 
 
 A Slimmer Night 
 
 A Wish 
 
 The Scholar- Gipsy 
 
 Thyrsis 
 
 Memorial Verses 
 
 Rugby Chapel 
 
 Heine s Grave 
 
 Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse 
 
 Stanzas in Memory of the Author of 
 
 Obermann 
 Obermann Once More 
 Rmpedoclcs on Etna (at least the songs) 
 Westminster Abbey 
 Geisfs Grave 
 
 (130) 
 
Stimulative Questions 
 
 hese questions are framed with the 
 sole fur-pose of enabling the reader 
 to apprehend more clearly the 
 important points in the books 
 presented in this course. They 
 are not " catch questions" nor 
 are they mere tests of the memory. They are, to borrow 
 an old title, "Aids to Reflection." The method which the 
 reader should follow in using these questions may perhaps 
 best be left to himself. An excellent plan would be to read 
 the books first with no reference to the questions ; then, 
 taking up the questions, to try how far memory and 
 judgment will go toward answering them ; and finally, 
 with the questions in mind, to refer once more to the 
 books, and freshen, correct, and fill up the ideas which 
 the questions are intended to suggest. To get the 
 greatest possible advantage from the course it would 
 be well to write out the conclusions reached by such a 
 method in a note-book, along with any original ideas that 
 the reading and the questions may have suggested. 
 Such a note-book should be preserved, for it will have 
 permanent value to its owner, not alone as a record of 
 reading, but as a memorial of a certain stage in the 
 development of his taste and judgment. 
 
 (131) 
 
STIMULATIVE QUESTIONS 
 
 VICTORIAN POETS 
 
 i. What influence did the scientific spirit exert on 
 poetry in the Victorian era ? 
 
 2. In what sense was the Victorian era an age of 
 transition ? 
 
 3. In what sense was Landor a pioneer of Victorian 
 poetry ? What are his chief poetic qualities ? Point 
 out his limitations. 
 
 4. What are some of the limitations and defects of 
 Arnold's poetry ? What are its finer characteristics ? 
 What is Arnold's most ideal trait ? 
 
 5. What influence did Mrs. Browning's early studies 
 have upon her poetic work ? How was her work influ- 
 enced by her marriage ? What are the finest traits of 
 her poetry ? 
 
 6. In what respect is Tennyson the most representa- 
 tive poet of his age ? 
 
 7. Trace the development of Tennyson's genius from 
 1830 to the completion of The Idyls of the King. 
 
 8. What are the most salient characteristics of Ten- 
 nyson's genius ? What are his most marked limitations ? 
 
 9. What are the most notable groups, or schools, 
 among the minor poets of the Victorian era ? What in- 
 fluences were predominant among them ? 
 
 10. What does Mr. Stedman say as to Browning's 
 dramatic gift, method of expression, and moral tone ? 
 
 11. What are the chief merits and defects of Brown- 
 ing's dramatic lyrics ? 
 
 (i33) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 12. Can any change be noted between Mr. Stedman's 
 attitude toward Browning in his first criticism of him 
 (chap, ix, sec. vin) and his later estimate (Supple- 
 mentary Review, sec. n) ? If so, does the change imply 
 error or inconsistency ? 
 
 13. What are the chief characteristics of Rossetti's 
 work ? Why did he exert so great an influence upon 
 younger poets ? 
 
 14. What is the chief merit of Swinburne's work ? 
 What moral questions were raised by the appearance of 
 his Poems and Ballads? What judgment may be passed, 
 on his dramatic works ? 
 
 THE POETR Y OF TENNYSON 
 
 1. What are the special characteristics of Tennyson's 
 early verse ? What characteristic of the poet's genius 
 is shown by his revision of The Palace of Art ? 
 
 2. What points of similarity can be discovered between 
 the life and work of Milton and Tennyson ? In what 
 points did they differ? Which are the essentials, the. 
 similarities or the differences ? 
 
 3. What are the chief defects and merits of The 
 Princess ? What are the most striking characteristics 
 of the hero in Maud? What is the twofold character of 
 In Memoriam ? How does the analysis of the poem 
 bring out this double character ? 
 
 4. In what order were The Idyls of the King com- 
 posed ? Why are they called idyls ? How can Tenny- 
 son's modernization of the spirit of the legend be 
 justified ? What are the dominant idea and the cardinal 
 defect of the Idyls taken as a whole ? 
 
 5. What reasons seem to have dictated Tennyson's, 
 choice of subjects for his historical plays ? 
 
 (i34) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 6. In what cardinal points do Tennyson's religious 
 ideas agree with the teachings of the Bible ? 
 
 7. What charge is commonly brought against Locksley 
 Hall Sixty Years After? Hew does Dr. Van Dyke 
 attempt to defend the poet ? Is his defence successful ? 
 
 8. In conclusion, what conception of Tennyson as a 
 poet and thinker did you obtain from this book ? Does 
 it agree with your preconceived ideas of Tennyson ? 
 Do your readings of Tennyson strengthen or weaken 
 this conception ? 
 
 9. How does Mr. Stedman's critical treatment of 
 Tennyson differ from Dr. Van Dyke's ? Does the com- 
 parison between Tennyson and Theocritus seem to you 
 more or less apt than the comparison between Tennyson 
 and Milton ? 
 
 LIFE AND LETTERS OF ROBERT BRO WNING 
 
 1. What influences were exerted upon Browning by 
 heredity and early environment ? 
 
 2. What early signs of poetic genius did he show ? 
 What poets influenced his early work ? Was this influ- 
 ence permanent ? 
 
 3. What are the most striking poetic qualities in 
 Pauline ? What was the poet's aim in writing Paracel- 
 sus? How was this poem received by the literary 
 world ? 
 
 4. Under what circumstances were Strafford and A 
 Blot in the ''Scutcheon composed and acted ? What were 
 the causes of their slight success ? 
 
 5. What may be said of the character and style of 
 Sordello ? 
 
 (i35) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 6. What remarkable plays and poems appeared in 
 Bells and Pomegranates f What is the significance of 
 the title ? How was the series received by the public ? 
 
 7. Under what circumstances did Browning make the 
 acquaintance of Miss Barrett ? What was the cause of 
 their secret marriage ? What report do her letters give 
 of their married life ? What was Browning's opinion of 
 his wife's poetic genius ? 
 
 8. What does Mrs. Orr say as to the religious tone 
 of Christmas-Eve and Easter- Day ? Does your own 
 knowledge of these poems confirm or reject her view ? 
 
 9. What poems of a more or less personal character 
 appeared in Browning's work during his married life ? 
 
 10. Where did Browning get the material for The 
 Ring and the Book ? In Avhat way did his wife's charac- 
 ter influence his treatment of Pompilia ? How was this 
 poem received by the public ? 
 
 11. How did Browning come to write La Saisiaz ? 
 What does Mrs. Orr say as to its relation to Christian 
 doctrine ? Does your knowledge of the poem confirm 
 or reject her view ? 
 
 12. What new departure in Browning's poetic method 
 is marked by the appearance of Dramatic Idyls ? 
 
 13. What was Browning's relation to the Browning 
 Society ? What influence did the society have on the 
 public ? 
 
 14. What were the most striking personal character- 
 istics of Browning ? 
 
 15. What do you think of Mrs. Orr's book as a biog- 
 raphy ? Can you point out any faults of style and com- 
 position ? Is her attitude toward the poet satisfactory ? 
 What do you think of her tone toward his religious 
 ideas ? 
 
 (136) 
 
Topics for Special Papers 
 
 VICTORIAN POETRY 
 
 i. General characteristics of Victorian poetry. 
 
 2. A contrast between Victorian and Elizabethan 
 poetry. 
 
 3. The relation of Victorian poetry to that of Words- 
 worth and his contemporaries. 
 
 4. The drama in Victorian poetry. 
 
 5. The epic, or narrative, in Victorian poetry. 
 
 6. Victorian lyric poetry. 
 
 TENNYSON 
 
 7. Tennyson's treatment of the Arthurian legends. 
 
 8. Tennyson's belief in immortality. 
 
 9. Tennyson as a poet of nature. 
 
 10. Tennyson's women. 
 
 11. Tennyson and Browning; a comparison and con- 
 trast. 
 
 BROWNING 
 
 12. Browning as a poet of love. 
 
 13. Browning's women. 
 
 14. Browning's poems on music and art. 
 
 15. Browning's dramatic method. 
 
 16. A comparison of Rabbi Ben Ezra with the 
 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. 
 
 17. Browning and the Christian religion. 
 
 ARNOLD 
 
 18. Arnold's elegies. 
 
 19. The classical element in Arnold's poetry. 
 
 20. The moral element in Arnold's poetry. 
 
 21. Arnold's treatment of nature. 
 
 22. Arnold as the poet of religious doubt. 
 
 037) 
 
Topics for Open Discussion 
 
 i. Is the Victorian age likely to be as famous in the 
 history of English poetry as that of Elizabeth or that of 
 the French Revolution ? 
 
 2. Is the popular estimate of Tennyson well founded ? 
 
 3. In what form of poetry — dramatic, epic, or lyric — 
 have the Victorian poets been most successful ? 
 
 4. On what will the fame of Tennyson permanently 
 rest — on his artistic perfections or on the ideas embodied 
 in his poetry ? 
 
 5. What is Tennyson's relation to revealed religion? 
 
 6. Is Browning an obscure poet ? 
 
 7. What is the chief difficulty in reading Browning ? 
 
 8. Would Browning under happier circumstances 
 have become a great dramatist ? 
 
 9. Is Browning's fame likely to increase or lessen in 
 the coming century ? 
 
 10. What right has Arnold to be grouped among the 
 greater Victorian poets ? 
 
 11. Is Arnold's poetry likely to outlive his prose? 
 
 12. Can any other poet of the Victorian era be ranked 
 with Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold ? 
 
 13. Which of the younger Victorian poets — Rossetti, 
 Morris, or Swinburne — has exerted the strongest influ- 
 ence upon his contemporaries ? 
 
 ('33) 
 
Supplementary Reading 
 
 VICTORIAN POETRY 
 There is no satisfactory history of Victorian lit- 
 erature as a whole. The handbooks by Mrs. 
 Oliphant, The Victorian Age of English Literature, 
 and Professor Saintsbury, Victorian Literature, 
 contain a large amount of not always accurate 
 information and a little criticism of the subjective 
 sort. Professor Walker' s ' ' The Age of Tennyson 
 (1830— 1870) is perhaps more satisfactory than 
 either of these ; and his Greater Victorian Poets 
 (Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold) is an interest- 
 ing work of appreciative, if not very original or 
 stimulating criticism. Miss Sharp's little hand- 
 book, Victorian Poets, avoids the error of trying to 
 say too much and concentrates attention on the 
 most important figures of the era. There are some 
 interesting chapters on the Victorian poets in Daw- 
 son's Makers of Modern Poetry. The last chap- 
 ters of Miss Scudder's book, The Life of the 
 Spirit in the Modem English Poets, contain 
 
 some suoro-estive criticisms on the Victorians and 
 00 
 
 a stimulating comparison of their spiritual ideals 
 with those of their predecessors, the poets of the 
 Revolution. 
 
 A good selection of poems by the minor Vic- 
 torian poets may be found in Stedman's Victorian 
 Anthology or in Palgrave's Golden Treasury of 
 Songs, second series. 
 
 (139) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 TENNYSON 
 Alfred, Lord Tennyson : A Memoir. By 
 
 Hallam Tennyson. 
 
 This is the standard and authoritative biography of 
 Tennyson. It is extremely interesting and valuable, 
 but only as a biography. It makes no attempt at any- 
 thing like a critical estimate of the poet's work, but 
 it contains some very interesting bits of criticism by 
 the poet himself. 
 
 Memories of the Tennysons. By Canon 
 
 Rawnsley. 
 
 A charming collection of reminiscences and anec- 
 dotes. 
 
 Alfred, Lord Tennyson : A Study of His 
 
 Life and Work. By Arthur Waugh. 
 As its name indicates, this book is a mixture of biog- 
 raphy and criticism. It is interesting, but not par- 
 ticularly illuminating. 
 
 Tennyson : His Homes, His Friends, and 
 
 His Work. By Elizabeth L. Cary. 
 This handsome gift book includes, in addition to an 
 outline of the poet's life, a collection of critical esti- 
 mates of his work. 
 
 Tennyson : His Art and Relation to 
 
 Modern Life. By Stopford A. Brooke. 
 This is probably the best of all critical studies of 
 Tennyson. The standpoint is that of an admiring, 
 but not adoring, exponent of the work of a great 
 
 (140) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 poet. Mr. Brooke is one of the most keen-sighted 
 and appreciative of English critics, as is abundantly 
 shown by the inestimable study of Shelley prefixed 
 to his selection from that poet's work in the Golden 
 Treasury series ; and he knows his English poets to£> 
 well to render to Tennyson the exclusive homage so> 
 customary among the middle and later Victorian 
 critics. But he does ample justice to the charm and! 
 perfection of Tennyson's art. It is perhaps too much 
 to say that we have in this book the final estimate of 
 Tennyson's work ; but one might hazard the guess. 
 that when the final estimate appears it will not be 
 essentially other than what is contained here. 
 
 Tennyson : A Critical Study. By Stephen: 
 
 Gwynn. 
 
 This not exactly profound work is interesting as. 
 showing the distinct reaction against the predomi- 
 nance of Tennyson which has set in since the poet's. 
 death. 
 
 Alfred Tennyson. By Andrew Lang. 
 
 This brief sketch of Tennyson's life is founded upon, 
 the Memoir, by Hallam Tennyson. The critical 
 opinions are Mr. Lang's own and are always inter- 
 esting. Mr. Lang proclaims himself a Tennysonian, 
 and frankly avows his disagreement with much of the: 
 latest criticism of the poet. 
 
 The Mind of Tennyson. By E. Hershey Sneath.. 
 This is a careful and impartial attempt to " interpret 
 and systematize Tennyson's thoughts on God, free- 
 dom and immortality." The point of view is that: 
 of the philosopher rather than the literary critic. 
 
 (HO 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 Among the numberless essays on the poetry of 
 Tennyson one is deserving of especial mention, 
 Professor Dowden's Mr. Tennyson and Mr. 
 Browning : A Comparative Study. Although 
 nearly a quarter of a century old, it remains today 
 as fresh and full of vital truth as ever. Its presen- 
 tation of the two poets as supplementary types of 
 character and thought is one on which a great 
 part of the criticism of today rests. 
 
 The reader may also be referred to the studies 
 by R. H. Hutton, Literary Essays ; Peter Bayne, 
 Lessons from My Masters, and G. W. Cooke, Poets, 
 mid Problems. Hippolyte Taine, in English Lit- 
 erature (book v, chapter vi), has written a stimu- 
 lating critique onTennyson from the French point 
 of view. An admirable answer to it will be found 
 in Swinburne's Miscellanies ("Tennyson and 
 Musset"). 
 
 BROWNING 
 
 Life of Browning. Great Writers Series. By Will- 
 iam Sharp. 
 
 This is a very readable little book combining a good 
 account of Browning's life with some capital criticism 
 of his work. In this latter respect, it is superior to 
 the authorized biography by Mrs. Orr. 
 
 Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Brown- 
 ing. By Mrs Ritchie. 
 
 This entertaining book by the daughter of Thackeray 
 contains some sixty pages of pleasant gossip about 
 the Brownings. 
 
 (142) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 Robert Browning: Personalia. By Edmund 
 
 Gosse. 
 
 Mr. Gosse has reprinted in this little book an article 
 of his on " The Early Career of Robert Browning, ' 
 which attracted much attention at the time of ire 
 first appearance. It was " inspired and partly dic- 
 tated, was revised and approved of" by the poet him- 
 self. To this article the author has added a few pages 
 of " Personal Impressions," not without value as 
 giving some definite image of Browning, the man. 
 
 Robert Browning, the Poet and the Man. 
 
 By Elizabeth L. Cary. 
 
 This book, a companion to the compilation on Tenny- 
 son by the same author, mentioned above (page 140), 
 is hardly so satisfactory a work. It contains, how- 
 ever, an outline of the poet's life and some rather 
 interesting critical extracts. 
 
 Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth 
 
 Barrett. Edited by R. B. Browning. 
 
 A great storm was raised a few years ago over the 
 publication by Robert Barrett Browning of the letters 
 that had passed between his parents during their 
 courtship and secret engagement. Waiving discussion 
 of the ethics or good taste of the publication of these 
 letters, it is impossible for the student of Browning 
 to let them pass unread. They contain not only a 
 record, perfect in every detail, of one of the strongest, 
 sweetest, and purest passions of literary history, but 
 also an insight into the mind and heart of the poet 
 such as nothing else affords. 
 
 (H3) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 
 
 Edited by Frederic G. Kerry on. 
 
 These letters, arranged in chronological order by the 
 editor, are joined together by links of narrative, thus 
 # forming an almost continuous record of Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's life. Over half the letters belong to the period 
 of her married life and are naturally full of allusions 
 to her poet husband. 
 
 There is, unfortunately, no satisfactory critical 
 estimate of Robert Browning's poetic genius and 
 accomplishment. A great number of books 
 (most of them quite worthless) have been written 
 about his work. Possibly the best study of Brown- 
 ing from the esthetic side is contained in Arthur 
 Symons' Introduction to the Study of Browning. 
 Professor Jones' Browning as a Philosophical and 
 Religious Teacher is by far the best book on 
 Browning as a thinker, but it is at times rather 
 difficult reading. Of introductions, handbooks, 
 guide-books, etc., to the study of Browning there 
 seems to be no end. The reader would do well 
 to leave them carefully alone and read the poems 
 themselves rather than books about the poet. 
 
 A few essays, however, may be mentioned as 
 specimens of hostile or appreciative criticism : 
 " Wordsworth,Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure r 
 Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry," 
 by Walter Bagehot, in Literary Studies; "On 
 the Alleged Obscurity of Mr. Browning's Poetry," 
 by Augustine Birrell, in Obiter Dicta; ''Robert 
 
 (144) 
 
The Greater Victorian Poets 
 
 Browning-," by John Jay Chapman, in Emerson 
 and Other Essays; "Mr. Browning," by R. H. 
 Hutton, in Literary Essays ; "La renaissance de 
 la poesie anglaise" by Gabriel Sarrazin. 
 
 ARNOLD 
 
 Matthew Arnold. By George Saintsbury. 
 
 This is by no means a satisfactory book, but it is the 
 only biography of the poet in existence. The criti- 
 cism contained in it is of very little value in itself, 
 but it is the kind that leads the reader to take up 
 the poems again — which is no bad result, after all, for 
 criticism to accomplish. 
 
 Letters of Matthew Arnold. Edited by G. W. 
 E. Russell. 
 
 These letters constitute one of the most entertaining 
 collections of correspondence in English. They are 
 of especial value as presenting a side of Arnold that 
 hardly appears at all in his poems and essays — the 
 domestic Arnold, kindly, gentle, home-loving, a de- 
 voted son, husband, and father, not far removed in 
 his household life from that object of his life-long 
 enmity, the British Philistine. 
 
 Thomas and Matthew Arnold. Great Educa- 
 tors Series. By Sir Joshua Fitch. 
 The last part of this little volume gives us a valuable 
 account of Arnold's work in elevating the school sys- 
 tem of England. 
 
 Among the numerous essays on Arnold, per- 
 haps the very best is "The Poetry of Matthew 
 
 (145) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 Arnold," by R. H. Hutton, in Literary Essays. 
 Mr. Birrell has a charming essay in Res Ju.dicatce y 
 and the reader may also be referred to the essays 
 by Professor Gates, in Three Studies in Literature, 
 and Professor Woodberry, in Makers of Literature 
 Another interesting study is " Matthew Arnold," 
 by J. M. Robertson, in Modern Humanists. 
 Arnold has been so often attacked by the ortho- 
 dox as an enemy of the faith that it is at least 
 amusing to see with how much more bitterness 
 he is assaulted in this essay by a thorough-going 
 agnostic and socialist as a cowardly betrayer of 
 the cause of progress. 
 
 (146) 
 
Twenty-Five Reading Courses 
 
 No. i— PROBLEMS IN MODERN DEMOCRACY 
 
 Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
 course are ex-President Cleveland; Woodrovv Wilson, Professor 
 of Politics, Princeton University ; Henry J. Ford, author of Rise 
 and Growth of American Politics; and Henry D. Lloyd, author 
 of Newest England. The books for the course are selected 
 by Mr. Cleveland. 
 
 No. 2— MODERN MASTERS OF MUSIC 
 
 Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
 course are Reginald de Koven, Dr. W. S. B. Mathews, editor of 
 Music ; James G. Huneker, editor of Musical Courier ; Henry 
 E. Krehbiel, musical critic New York Tribune; and Gustave 
 Kobbe, author of Wagner s Life and Works. The most attrac- 
 tive reading course ever offered to lovers of music. 
 
 No. 3— RAMBLINGS AMONG ART CENTRES 
 
 Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
 course are F. Hopkinson Smith, Dr. John C. Van Dyke, Dr. 
 John La Farge, President of the Society of American Artists ; 
 Kenyon Cox and Dr. Russell Sturgis. The handbook is 
 attractively illustrated. Mr. Smith and Dr. Van Dyke are 
 responsible for selecting the books to be read. 
 
 No. 4— AMERICAN VACATIONS IN EUROPE 
 
 This course is the next best thing to going abroad oneself. 
 Among the contributors to the handbook are Frank R. Stockton, 
 Jeannette L. Gilder, editor of The Critic; Mrs. Schuyler Crown- 
 inshield and George Ade. The handbook has a fine portrait 
 frontispiece. 
 
 No. 5 _A STUDY OF SIX NEW ENGLAND CLASSICS 
 
 The books for this course are selected by Dr. Edward 
 Everett Hale. Among the contributors to the handbook are 
 Dr. Hale, Julian Hawthorne, Mrs. James T. Fields and Dr. 
 Edward Waldo Emerson. Dr. Emerson is a son of Ralph Waldo 
 Emerson. This is one of the most attractive courses in the 
 entire series. 
 
 No. 6- SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH KINGS 
 
 The plays are selected for this course by H. Beerbohm 
 Tree, the well-known English actor, and the books to be read 
 in connection with the plays are selected by Sir Henry 
 
 (H9) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 Irving. Among the other contributors to the handbook are Prof. 
 Edward Dowden, acknowledged the greatest Shakespearean 
 scholar of Great Britain, Dr. Hiram Corson, of Cornell Univer- 
 sity; Dr. William J. Rolfe and Dr. Hamilton W. Mabie. /The 
 handbook is very attractively illustrated. 
 
 No. 7— CHARLES DICKENS: HIS LIFE AND WORK 
 
 Among the contributors to the delightful handbook accompany- 
 ing this course are George W. Cable, the well-known novelist; 
 Irving Bacheller, author of Eben Holden; Andrew Lang, the 
 distinguished English writer ; Amelia E. Barr, the novelist ; and 
 James L. Hughes, author of Dickens as an Educator. The 
 books to be read are selected by Mr. Cable and Mr. 
 Bacheller. The handbook is beautifully illustrated. 
 
 No. 8— CHILD STUDY FOR MOTHERS AND TEACHERS 
 
 Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
 course are Margaret E. Sangster, Nora Archibald Smith, Anne 
 Emilie Poulson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucy Wheelock 
 and Kate Gannett Wells. Mrs. Sangster selects the books to be 
 read. . 
 
 No. 9— INDUSTRIAL QUESTIONS OF THE DAY 
 
 The following distinguished writers on economic problems 
 contribute to the handbook accompanying this course : Presi- 
 dent Jacob Gould Schurman, of Cornell University ; Jeremiah 
 Whipple Jenks, Professor of Political Science, Cornell University ; 
 Richard Theodore Ely, Director of the School of Economics, 
 Political Science and History, University of Wisconsin ; Sidney 
 Webb, Lecturer London School of Economics and Political 
 Science, Member London County Council ; and Carroll Davidson 
 Wright, United States Commissioner of Labor. 
 
 No. io— FLORENCE IN ART AND LITERATURE 
 
 Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
 course are William Dean Howells, Dr. Russell Stnrgis, Frank 
 Preston Stearns, author of Midsummer of Italian Art, Life of 
 Tintoretto, etc. ; Dr. William Henry Goodyear, Curator Fine Arts 
 Museum of Brooklyn Institute; and Lewis Frederick Pilcher, 
 Professor of Art, Vassar College. The handbook has some 
 attractive illustrations. 
 
 No. ii— STUDIES OF EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS 
 
 The books have been selected specially for this course by the 
 Rt. Hon. James Bryce, of the English House of Commons, and 
 the Hon. Andrew D. White, United States Ambassador to Ger- 
 
 (150) 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 many. Among the other contributors to the handbook are Jesse 
 Macy, Professor of Constitutional History and Political Science, 
 Iowa College; and John William Burgess, Professor of Political 
 Science and Constitutional Law, and Dean of the Faculty of 
 Political Science, Columbia University. 
 
 No. 12— FAMOUS WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
 course are Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Deland 
 and Charlotte Brewster Jordan. The handbook has several 
 very interesting illustrations. 
 
 No. 13— THE MODERN CITY AND ITS PROBLEMS 
 
 Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
 course are Dr. Frederic W. Speirs ; Dr. Albert Shaw, editor 
 of The Review of Reviews ; Bird S. Coler, Comptroller of the 
 City of New York, author of Municipal Government ; and Charles 
 J. Bonaparte, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the 
 National Municipal League. The books are selected by Dr. 
 Speirs. 
 
 No. 14— STUDIES IN APPLIED ELECTRICITY 
 
 This is without exception the most attractive and the most 
 helpful reading course ever offered to students of electricity. 
 Thomas A. Edison selects the books specially for these studies. 
 Among the other contributors to the handbook are Dr. Edwin 
 J. Houston, Dr. Elihu Thomson, Carl Hering, Ex-President of 
 the American Institute of Electrical Engineers ; and Arthur V. 
 Abbott, Chief Engineer of the Chicago Telephone Company. 
 
 No. 15— FIVE WEEKS' STUDY OF ASTRONOMY 
 
 Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
 course are Charles A. Young, Professor of Astronomy, Prince- 
 ton University ; Sir Robert S. Ball, Professor of Astronomy, 
 Cambridge University, and Director of Cambridge Observa- 
 tory, England ; Camille Flammarion, founder of the As- 
 tronomical Society of France, and author of Marvels of the 
 Heavens, Astronomy, etc.; George C. Comstock, Director of 
 Washburn Observatory, University of Wisconsin ; and Harold 
 Jacoby, Professor of Astronomy, Columbia University. The 
 study programme includes contributions from the most famous 
 astronomers of England and France. 
 
 No. 16— RECENT ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 
 
 Lovers of the best modern dramas will find much pleasure in 
 these studies. Among the contributors to the handbook are 
 Brander Matthews, Professor of Literature, Columbia University; 
 
 ('50 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 Dr. William Winter, Dramatic Critic for the New York Tribune ; 
 Dr. Harry Thurston Peck, Editor of The Bookman; Louise 
 Chandler Moulton ; and Norman Hapgood, the well-known 
 writer of dramatic criticism. The handbook has some interest- 
 ing illustrations. 
 
 No. 17— STUDIES IN CURRENT RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 
 
 The books are chosen for the course by Dr. Lyman Abbott 
 and Dr. Washington Gladden. Among the contributors to 
 the handbook are Dr. Samuel D. McConnell, Rector of Holy 
 Trinity Church, Brooklyn ; President William DeWitt Hyde, of 
 Bowdoin College ; Dr. Amory H. Bradford, Editor of The 
 Outlook ; Dr. Henry Collin Minton, of San Francisco TheologicaJ 
 Seminary, late Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly ; 
 Dr. H. W. Thomas, Pastor of the People's Church, Chicago; 
 and Dr. Theodore T. Munger, Pastor of the United Congrega- 
 tional Church, New Haven. For clergymen and laymen who 
 wish to stimulate the growth of a theology which is in harmony 
 with the best thought of the time we recommend this handbook 
 and this reading course. 
 
 No. 18— THE GREATER VICTORIAN POETS 
 
 The books are selected for this course by Thomas Bailey 
 Aldrich. Among the other contributors to the handbook are 
 Thomas R. Lounsbury, Professor of English, Yale University; 
 Dr. T. M. Parrott, of Princeton University ; and Marie Ada Moli- 
 neux, author of The Phrase Book of Browning. 
 
 No. 19— OUT-OF-DOOR AMERICANS 
 
 Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
 course are John Burroughs, Ernest Seton-Thompson, President 
 David Starr Jordan, of the Leland Stanford Junior University ; 
 Ernest Ingersoll and Hamlin Garland. Lovers of nature will 
 find delight in the outlines and recommendations of this course. 
 
 No. 20— THE WORLD'S GREAT WOMAN NOVELISTS 
 
 Mrs. Humphry Ward, the well-known English novelist, is the 
 first contributor to the handbook accompanying this course. 
 The other contributors are Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Mary 
 E. Wilkins, Agnes Repplier, Katherine Lee Bates, Professor of 
 English, Wellesley College; and Oscar Fay Adams. The hand- 
 book contains some interesting illustrations. 
 
 No. 21— AMERICAN FOUNDATION HISTORY 
 
 Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge selects the books for this course. 
 Among the other contributors are Albert Bushnell Hart, Pro- 
 fessor of American History, Harvard University ; John Bach 
 
The Booklovers Reading Club 
 
 McMaster, Professor of American History, University of Penn- 
 sylvania ; Reuben Gold Thwaites, Secretary of the State Histori- 
 cal Society of Wisconsin, author of The Colonies ; Paul Leicester 
 Ford, author of Janice Meredith; and Andrew Cunningham 
 McLaughlin, Professor of American History, University of 
 Michigan. 
 
 No. 22— STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERARY LIFE 
 
 Professor Barrett Wendell and Professor Lewis E. Gates, of 
 Harvard, and Dr. Horace E. Scudder, late editor of The Atlantic 
 Monthly, contribute to the handbook accompanying this course. 
 For a brief stimulative and instructive course in American litera- 
 ture nothing better could possibly be offered. 
 
 No. 23— STUDIES IN RECENT FRENCH FICTION 
 
 Alcee Fortier, Professor of Romance Languages, Tulane 
 University of Louisiana, has chosen the books for this reading 
 course. Among the contributors to the handbook are the three 
 distinguished French- writers, Edouard Rod, Ferdinand Bru- 
 netiere and Paul Bourget, and the notable American critic. 
 Dr. Benjamin W. Wells, author of Modern French Literature and 
 A Century of French Literature. 
 
 No. 24— THE ENGLISH BIBLE : HOW WE GOT IT 
 
 The contributors to this course include President William R. 
 Harper, of the University of Chicago ; John Franklin Genung, 
 Professor of Rhetoric, Amherst College ; William Newton Clarke, 
 Professor of Christian Theology, Colgate University; and Richard 
 G. Moulton, Professor of English Literature, University of 
 Chicago. The handbook is a very interesting and instructive 
 volume in itself. 
 
 No. 25— THE MECHANISM OF 
 
 PRESENT DAY COMMERCE 
 
 /;/ Preparation . The books are selected by the Hon. Lyman 
 }. Gage, Secretary of the Treasury. 
 
 (153) 
 


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