FOUR VICTORIAN POETS

WHE

INTRODUCTORY

HEN Byron and Shelley died, the impulse given to poetry by the ideas concerning man,

which we now call democratic, was exhausted for a time in English poetry. At the same time the impulse given to poetry by the hatred of them had also been exhausted. There was no passion for or against these ideas left in the nation. And England, thus deprived of animating conceptions concerning man—derived either from the far past or from the present-sank into a dreary commonplace.

Then Keats, who had felt this exhaustion before the death of Bryon and Shelley, finding no ideas in the present, recovered for poetry the ideas of the past. He called on England to live for beauty, and bade her find it in the myths of Greece, and in the stories of romance. In these, he thought-recast so as to manifest the power of love, truth, and beauty-the poet would receive into his heart the impassionating ideas of the past, realise the deep emotion he needed for his work,

I

and give to men the high pleasure which is the use and honour of his art. He has done that for us, he has se

But in

cured to English poetry a devotion to beauty. his own time his effort failed. There was no response. Charmed he never so wisely, England, a deaf adder, stopped her ears. The poetry of Keats awakened no new poetic life in the England of his time; it had no children then.

There was one man, however, who might be called a younger brother of Keats, and whom we cannot class among those who merely kept poetry alive in the years which followed the deaths of Shelley, Byron, and Keats. Charles Wells stands on a higher level than the poets of that weak parenthesis which ended with the rise of Browning and Tennyson in the famous years of 1830 to 1833, when romance was re-born both in France and England. Inferior in genius and in art to Keats, he was his personal friend, and drank of his spirit. But the deadness of the time seized on him and he only produced a single poem-the drama of Joseph and his Brethren. As Keats revealed afresh the beauty of the Greek and medieval stories, so Wells unfolded the beauty of a Hebrew tale, recast it for modern thought and feeling, and filled its outlines with modern imaginations. Nevertheless, and this marks his power and taste, he did not spoil its simplicity.

When we have read the drama, the old story still stands apart with quiet steadfastness. It is not spoiled by its new clothing. Yet what we read is Western not

Eastern, not Hebraic but romantic.

The events are

the same, but the atmosphere is changed. The characters are fully developed, and distinguished each from each in modern fashion. The great situations are worked out with a close analysis, and into a great complexity quite apart from the Hebrew genius. The ornament is lavish, and the scenery, which the Hebrew story does not touch, is invented, both for Palestine and Egypt, with all the care, observation, and pleasure of a poet who had read the nature-poetry of Shelley and Wordsworth and walked hand in hand with Keats, his lover and friend, through the landscape of England.

The book was published a year after the death of Keats, under the pseudonym of H. L. Howard. It fell out of sight for nearly fifty years when Rossetti, in Gilchrist's Life of Blake, spoke of it as "poetry of the very first class whose time will surely come." Thirteen years afterwards, in 1876, Mr. Swinburne republished it with a preface, in which he over-topped Rossetti's praise by praise of his own, but neither of these fine artists have succeeded in securing for it the general admiration and reading it deserves.

The story of Joseph, ranging from the pastoral life of a wandering tribe to the life and government of a settled kingdom, passing, as it follows the fortunes of Joseph, through a multitude of events, characters, and types of men, and holding in it the fates of the Jewish people, is one of the great stories of the world, and worth an epic treatment. Charles Wells did not feel