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TO A.D. 1900]

JOHN RUSKIN

1081

Starting with the warning to painters that they should show truly the forms of clouds, and trees, and mountain ranges, he enlarged his teaching from the first by application of it to sincerity of life. The second volume of Modern Painters was followed in 1849 by The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and the three volumes of The Stones of Venice were published in 1851-1853. The stress laid by Ruskin in his Modern Painters upon fidelity of expression and purity of colour, of both of which he found illustrations in the painters before Raffaelle, influenced many young artists, who followed the counsel given and formed what was known as the Preraphaelite School, which Ruskin justified and interpreted, in 1851, with a pamphlet on Preraphaelitism. In 1857 John Ruskin pub

lished The Political Economy of Art, with a plan for dis covering and fertilising all seeds of artistic power in the country. The Two Paths, in 1858, contrasted the barren results of an art based on mechanical principles with the fruitfulness of an art based on living observation. Unto this Last, in 1862, enforced need of the development of the individual in the State. In these and other writings the antagonism to sound doctrines of political economy comes of antipathy to every word or deed that seems to treat masses of men as parts of a human machine. The main consideration that must never be left out of sight, can only be true life in each of us. What error there may be in Ruskin's teaching comes of deep perception of the main truth, with a prophet-like insistance upon that alone as the one truth to be enforced directly upon men. In 1865 appeared Ethics of the Dust, ten lectures on the Elements of Civilisation; in the same year Sesame and Lilies, two lectures on the Reading of Books. In 1866 followed The Crown of Wild Olives, three lectures on Work, Traffic, and War. In 1867 John Ruskin obtained the honorary degree of LL.D. from the University of Cambridge, and he was elected at Oxford Slade Professor of Fine Art. The Queen of the Air, in 1869, was a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm. On the 1st of January, 1871, he dated the first of a series of occasional letters entitled Fors Clavigera, of which the last was dated Christmas, 1884. Through this series there has been a continuous setting forth in his own way of his own ideas as a Reformer A sketch of his own life, published in short sections, and called Præterita, followed in 1885-86. He lingered in his home among the Lakes until the last year of the century.

There was a like sense of life in Mrs. Browning's Cry of the Children. The first book of poems to which that true poetess set her name, The Seraphim, represented voices of the angels as they looked at Him who yet hung dying on the cross at Calvary. Out of the depths of Christianity came her plea for the higher life of man. Her call for union of the thinker with the worker, the idealist with the man eager to provide for each day's bitter need, gave to her poem of Aurora Leigh, published in 1857, a tone blending with the thoughtful music of her husband. Robert Browning, in his Paracelsus, showed the failure of one who desired at a bound to reach the far ideal; in Sordello showed the poet before Dante, seeking his true place in life, and finding it only when he became leader of men in the real battle of life, and poet all the more. If there be no full civilisation to be won on earth by those who shall come after us in distant years, yet we must labour on, not dreaming, but doing. And to the poet we must go for utterances of the soul of action; for no true poet is "an idle singer," and no day "an empty day." Yet let us not wrest unduly from their sense these words from the prelude to The Earthly Paradise of William Morris, who was three years old at the beginning of the reign. His poems have their own great charm, though not the greatest. Born in 1834, the son of a rich merchant, after education at Marlborough and at Exeter College he studied painting, turned to poetry, and published in 1858 some short Arthurian pieces, The Defence of Guenevere, with "King Arthur's Tomb," "Sir Galahad," "The Chapel in Lyonesse," and other poems. In 1863 he applied his genius as an artist to the founding of an establishment for the supply of refined household decorations. In 1867. he published a long poem on The Life and Death of Jason; and from 1868 to 1870 the series of tales in verse, drawn chiefly from the old legends of Greece and Scandinavia, entitled The Earthly Paradise. This book, in four volumes, the delight of painters, established William Morris's high reputation as a poet. It passed through five editions before the end of the year in which its last volume appeared. Love is Enough; or, the Freeing of Pharamond, followed in 1873; then in 1876 The Eneid of Virgil in English Verse. William Morris then drew freely from the stores of the old Scandinavian literature, which is second only to the ancient Greek in freshness and vigour of life. He joined Mr. Eirikr Magnusson in giving English form to the tales of Grettir the Strong, 1869;

TO A.D. 1896] WILLIAM MORRIS. THOMAS HUGHES 1083

the Story of the Volsungs and the Niblungs, 1870; Three Northern Love Stories, 1875; and produced in 1877 a poem on The Story of Sigurd, the Volsung, and the Fall of the Niblungs. In 1882 William Morris published five Lectures, which had been delivered in 1878-81, on Hopes and Fears for Art; and in 1884 a little book on Art and Socialism, turning with deep sincerity from poetry that he had been treating, perhaps, too much as an ornament apart from the real work of life, to verse and prose applied directly in aid of the socialist view of its chief pro blems, as The Dream of John Ball, in 1890. He died in 1896.

Thomas Hughes, aged fourteen at the beginning of the reign, was a boy under Dr. Arnold at Rugby, and afterwards helped to quicken a new generation with the spirit of his teacher, in the most popular of his books, Tom Brown's Schooldays, first published in 1856. It was followed, in 1861, by Tom Brown at Oxford. In the same year appeared his Tracts for Priests and People, republished in 1868 as A Layman's Faith. In aid of a colony that was to share the energies of cultivated life, the Rugby spirit, planted in new soil, Thomas Hughes published, in 1885, Gone to Texas, letters from our boys. The good spirit of Frederick Maurice and Charles Kingsley lived on through all the work of Thomas Hughes. He died in 1896.

59. Alfred Tennyson (ch. xiii., § 27), in December, 1883. was raised to the peerage as Baron Tennyson, of Aldworth, Sussex, and of Freshwater, Isle of Wight. He published in 1885 Tiresias and other Poems; in 1886, Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After; in 1889, Demeter and other Poems, with the old life strong at the close of an active career of sixty years, dating from the volume of Poems, chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson, first published in 1830. Tennyson's verse has shown the way from death to life through the sustained song of immortality, his In Memoriam; has once more spiritualised our national romance hero, and associated tales of Arthur with the Conscience, the King within the human breast. Among poets of the reign of Victoria, he, too, wore his laurel as a "blameless king." He died on October 6th, 1892.

Lewis Morris, born in Carmarthen in 1834, educated at Sherborne School and at Jesus College, Oxford, was called to the Bar in 1861, and was in practice as a conveyancing barrister when his Songs of Two Worlds appeared, in 1871, followed by two more volumes under the same title in 1874 and 1875. In 1876 and 1877 his reputation was confirmed and

extended by the Epic of Hades, which applied the wisdom of old classical mythology to those higher interests of life that are to-day as they have ever been. In December, 1878, Lewis Morris published Gwen, a drama in Monologue; in 1880, The Ode of Life; in 1883, Songs Unsung; in 1886, Gycia, a Tragedy; in 1887, Songs of Britain; in 1896, Idylls and Lyrics. In 1890 his Works, which had passed separately through many editions, were collected into a single volume. He was knighted in 1895.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose verse is alive with music, was born in 1837, son of an admiral by the daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham. He was for a time at Balliol College, Oxford, but left without graduation and went abroad, attaching himself in Italy to Walter Savage Landor, and coming, in France, under the influence of Victor Hugo. After publishing in 1861 two plays, The Queen Mother and Rosamond, and in 1865 the tragedy of Chastelard, Mr. Swinburne leapt to fame in the same year, 1865, by the great success of his play written in the form of a Greek tragedy, Atalanta in Calydon. His next book, Poems and Ballads, in 1866, was subjected to an immoderate attack on what were considered to be moral grounds. A Song of Italy followed in 1867; William Blake, a Critical Essay, in 1868; Songs before Sunrise, in 1871; Bothwell, a Tragedy, in 1874; Songs of Two Nations, and also Essays and Studies and George Chapman, a Critical Essay, in 1875; Erechtheus, a Tragedy, in 1876; A Note on Charlotte Brontë, in 1877; a second series of Poems and Ballads, in 1878; A Study of Shakespeare, in 1880, and in the same year, Studies in Song, Songs of the Springtides, and Specimens of Modern Poets, the Heptalogia, or Seven against Sense. In 1881 Mr. Swinburne published Mary Stuart, a Tragedy; in 1882, Tristram of Lyonesse; in 1883, A Century of Roundels; in 1884, A Midsummer Holiday, and Poems; in 1885, Marino Faliero, a Tragedy; in 1886, Miscellanies; in 1889, a third series of Poems and Ballads, and a Study of Ben Jonson; in 1890, The Sisters, A Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning, and Sacred and Shakespearian Affinities; in 1893, Grace Darling; in 1894, Studies in Prose and Poetry and Astrophel; in 1896, The Tale of Balen; and in 1899, Rosamund.

SUPPLEMENT

TO THE DEATHS OF SWINBURNE AND MEREDITH

By E. W. EDMUNDS, M.A., B.Sc.

Author of "Shelley: His Poetry and Life," etc. etc.

1. Poetry. The years that have passed since the last of the preceding pages was written have done much to throw the most recent names there mentioned into a truer perspective than it was possible for their author to take. At our greater distance the peaks stand out more clearly, and smaller features which were overlooked at the time have made their presence known. It is now evident, for example, that Browning was one of the mighty voices of his age; and men like Ro setti, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and Meredith, who were appreciated only by narrow circles of admirers, cannot to-day be left out of a record of our literature, however acutely we may dislike their views or disrelish their methods.

It is not so difficult, perhaps, to indicate the proper position of these undoubted great men as to attempt to estimate the production of the past few years. This latter task is especially difficult in the realm of poetry, because, whatever other view we may take of it, the reign of Edward VII. did not produce a new poet of high rank or notable genius, while it deprived us of those links which remained to connect us with the past generation. The reign cost us Meredith and Swinburne, and did not give us their peer. Some of the minor poets are indeed sweet singers, and some have a real faculty for verse. on an epoch which is unfavourable to of fluid beliefs and uncertain ideals. Like the Elizabethan age, the Victorian was specially rich in great poetry; and as the Elizabethan was succeeded by the comparatively sterile Caroline period, in which all the good poetry was lyrical-so now: circumstances seem to favour the songs of isolated singers; there is no national poetic impulse, no Zeit-Geist which is apt for the loftier strains of the epic or the tragic Muse.

But they have fallen great poetry, an epoch

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