English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Great Britain -- Intellectual life -- 19th century
These writers are unusually hard to classify, because of the absence of
any dominant note or of any absorbing interest. The two women first named,
Mrs. Hemans and 'L. E. L.,' belong rather to the preceding period, though
they overlap this. Both are sentimentalists, and time has taken from
their work the charm it once possessed. Mrs. Hemans is now unduly
depreciated, but the difference between the most favourable and the least
favourable critic can only be with regard to the degree of weakness
charged against her. L. E. Landon (1802-1838), who became by marriage Mrs.
Maclean, was in her own day even more popular than Mrs. Hemans, but she
has since been much more completely forgotten. Even the mystery of her
death, which was believed by many to be due to foul play, but which in all
probability occurred through misadventure, has failed to keep alive the
interest in her. Yet, though her verse is of little value, she is one of
the best examples of the tendencies of the time. She followed Byron as far
as her talents and the restraints of her sex would allow. Her longer poems
are on the whole poor; some of her shorter pieces are very readable, but
they are chargeable with the fault of an excess of rhetoric. Such as she
was in poetry, her work was mostly done before 1830. After that date she
wrote some mediocre prose stories, but was comparatively inactive in
verse.
[Sidenote: Charles Tennyson Turner (1808-1879).]
Both of Tennyson's brothers, Charles and Frederick, were, like himself,
poets. It has but recently become known that Frederick as well as Charles
had a share in the _Poems by Two Brothers_. Except for this the eldest
brother's publications were of much later date; but Charles Tennyson,
afterwards Charles Tennyson Turner, followed up the joint venture with
another of his own, a slim volume of _Sonnets and Fugitive Pieces_,
published in 1830. This attracted the attention of Coleridge, who bestowed
warm but discriminating praise upon the sonnets. Both as to fame, and
probably as to his own productiveness, Charles Tennyson Turner was
crushed, as it were, under his greater brother. He wrote little more,
though he carefully revised and in some respects decidedly improved his
sonnets. It is by virtue of them that he takes his place among English
poets. They are graceful and sweet, but the substance is not always worthy
of the form. They reveal everywhere the interests and the pursuits of the
Vicar of Grasby, and they are honourable to his peaceful piety. It is
evident that both Charles and Frederick Tennyson, and especially the
latter, might have been disposed to adapt to themselves the humorous
complaint of the second Duke of Wellington, and exclaim, 'What can a man
do with such a brother?' Though the eldest of the three, Mr. Frederick
Tennyson belongs by the date of his publications rather to the period
after than to the period before 1870.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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