CHAPTER XII

THE VICTORIAN SPASMODICS

LAST term I promised you a lecture upon those two minor schools of Victorian poets respectively called the Spasmodic and the Pre-Raphaelite. We shall begin today a short lecture on the Spasmodic school, which you know even less about than about the other. Already I have told you that the sarcastic term of "Spasmodic" must not be taken literally, that it was unjust, and that the school, although having no great sustained force, did some good work and must not be despised. Some of the best examples of that work have found their way into the best collections of Victorian poems, which is proof positive that the school has merit. If it could not live-that was only because its keynote was strong emotion, and you can not keep up such a tone indefinitely. The school exhausted itself at an early day.

I am not quite sure of being able to define for you accurately by any list of names, the composition of that school. Many who did work for it can not be said to have belonged to it for more than a very short time. Without any doubt I should have to put Miss Barrett (Mrs. Browning) into that school, and yet she occasionally rose above it. I should have to put Owen Meredith into the same class, for example-and Owen Meredith nevertheless worked in an entirely different direction. Alexander Smith has been called one of the Spasmodics; but I can show you some of his work that is scarcely inferior to corresponding work of Tennyson's. And then there is James Thomson, the greatest of English pessimistic poets, the only man in English. literature whom we can fairly compare with the Italian Giacomo Leopardi. I think you have heard of Leopardi as par

ticularly famous among pessimistic poets; but I think that Thomson, in spite of his want of education, is much more remarkable for the force of his pessimism than the delicate Italian sufferer. Well, as I have said, Thomson has been called a Spasmodic; but there is a dignity and massive power in much of his work which cannot be called spasmodic at all. It would be truer to call it Miltonic.

In fact, we must consider that the appellation Spasmodic refers to the faults of the school. The meaning of the word "spasmodic" is, as I told you, excess of emotion wrought up to the point of morbidness or sickness. But this does not mean that emotion is to be condemned because it is too strong. On the contrary such emotionalism, in real life, indicates weakness, sickness, disease of the nerves, loss of will power. An emotion cannot be too strong for artistic use; see the tremendous and terrible display of passion in Shakespeare's plays, incomparably stronger than anything in the Spasmodic school of poetry. But such passions, when artistically expressed, come like sudden storms and as quickly pass; for they are the passions of powerful and healthy men and women. Not so in the case of sickly or mawkish feeling; that is long-drawn and wearisome like the crying of a fretful child, or like the complaining of a sick man whose nerves are out of order. In the case of a child crying for a good reason, we are all sorry, and we do our best to comfort the child; but if the child continues to cry long after the pain is over, we become tired, and think that it looks very ugly as it cries. And if the child persists in crying for another half hour, we suspect a malicious intention and become angry with the child. Now the Spasmodic poets make us angry in exactly the same way; they cry without reason. There is a temptation to do the same thing in the case of almost all young students who have the two gifts of poetical sensibility and imagination; when they begin to treat of a pathetic subject, they are very likely to become too pathetic. That is partly because they are young, and

have not yet had time to learn the literary secret that emotion must be compressed like air to serve an artistic object. You know that the more you can compress the air the more powerful it becomes, and in mechanics, compressed air is one of the great motive forces. Emotion in literature is, in exactly the same way, a motive force; but you must compress it to get the power. This the poets of the Spasmodic school refuse to do.

Nevertheless they obtained immediate, though brief, popularity—which encouraged them to cry still louder than before. But why? Simply because to persons of uncultured taste the higher zones of emotion are out of reach. Their nerves are somewhat dull; they are moved by very simple things, and would not be moved at all perhaps by great things. Everywhere there is a public of this kind, to whom lachrymose emotion and mawkish sentiment give the same kind of pleasure that black, red and blazing yellow give to the eyes of little children and savages. In England this public is particularly large. But after all, it is capable of learning, and it gets tired at last of what is not good, just as an intelligent child is able to learn, after a time, that certain colours are vulgar and others gentle. When the English public learned the faults of what they were admiring, they dropped the Spasmodics and forgot their beauties as well as their faults. But there are beauties which ought not to be forgotten; and some of these are to be found in the work of Sydney Dobell.

Sydney Dobell was the son of a wine merchant, and himself became a wine dealer, which he remained during the greater part of his life. He was well educated, and with a better conception of art might have done very good things. As it is, nobody can read the whole of his poetry without disliking him; it is too mawkish. This was not the result of bad training. It was the expression of a belief prevalent in certain literary circles of the time, that Tennyson and his followers were too cold, and that a more

emotional school of poetry was needed. The Pre-Raphaelite circle had the same opinion. The opinion was right. But while the Pre-Raphaelite went to work in the right direction to improve upon the methods of the earlier Romantics, the Spasmodics went to work in the wrong direction. They exaggerated pathos without perceiving that the more room given to it, the weaker it becomes. Nevertheless, before they failed they succeeded in giving a few beautiful things to English anthologies; and several of these are by Dobell.

Out of the mass of Dobell's work I think that there are really only three first class pieces, although the new Oxford anthology makes a different choice. I have no alternative but to exercise my own judgment; and I give the preference to the pieces entitled, "Tommy's Dead," "How's My Boy?" and the queer little ballad said to have inspired the refrain of Rossetti's wonderful "Sister Helen."

I shall first quote from "Tommy's Dead." This poem represents the grief of a father for the loss of his favourite son. The father is a farmer, a very old man, and weak in his mind. All the poem I shall not quote; it has the fault of being very much too long. But the best parts of it are powerful and striking.

You may give over plough, boys,
You may take the gear to the stead;
All the sweat of your brow, boys,
Will never get beer and bread.
The seed's waste, I know, boys,
There's not a blade will grow, boys,
'Tis cropped out, I trow, boys,

And Tommy's dead.

So the poem opens. The old man is working in the field with his sons, and suddenly hearing the news of the death of his favourite, is filled with despair. It seems to him that life is not worth living, that it is quite useless to work any more, that everything is all wrong in the world. He

wants his sons to sell the spare horse; he thinks the cow will die; he wants the hired men and women paid off and sent away. Evidently he is becoming crazed. In the fourth stanza the fact appears without any question, for he begins to talk to the ghost of his long dead daughter whom he thinks he sees standing in the middle of the floor. Then visions come thick before him, and in the fifth section of the poem these visions are described in a manner not to be easily forgotten. All the strength of the poem is here:

There's something not right, boys,

But I think it's not in my head,
I've kept my precious sight, boys,-,
The Lord be hallowed.

Outside and in

The ground is cold to my tread,
The hills are wizen and thin,
The sky is shrivelled and shred;
The hedges down by the loan
I can count them bone by bone,
The leaves are open and spread;
But I see the teeth of the land,
And hands like a dead man's hand
And the eyes of a dead man's head.
There is nothing but cinders and sand,
The rat and the mouse have fled,
And the summer's empty and cold;
O'er valley and wold

Wherever I turn my head
There's a mildew and a mould,

The sun's going out overhead
And I'm very old,

And Tommy's dead!

The most powerful line in this quotation is about the "teeth of the land." One never forgets that after reading the poem. It is a scriptural idea; the old farmer remembers his Bible and the words of the old Hebrew prophets about the land that devours nations. Only, in his weakness and half madness these memories of the Bible take strange shapes