An Appreciation of Professor Palgrave
A familiar figure in literary circles, a fine critic, a graceful and scholarly minor poet, and one whose name will long be held in affectionate remembrance by lovers of English poetry, has passed away in the person of Francis Turner Palgrave. It would be absurd to place him beside Matthew Arnold—to whose genius, to whose characteristic accomplishments, to whose authority and influence, he had no pretension. And yet it may be questioned whether, after Arnold, any other critic of our time contributed so much to educate public taste where, in this country, it most needs such education. If, as a nurse of poets and in poetic achievement, England stands second to no nation in Europe, in no nation in the world has the standard of popular taste been so low, has the insensibility to what is excellent, and the perverse preference of what is mediocre to what is of the first order, been so signally, so deplorably, conspicuous. The generation which produced Wordsworth preferred Moore, and no less a person than the author of Vanity Fair wrote:—"Old daddy Wordsworth may bless his stars if he ever gets high enough in Heaven to black Tommy Moore's boots." While the readers of Keats might have been numbered on his fingers, Robert Montgomery's Satan and Omnipresence of the Deity were going through their twelfth editions. During many years, for ten readers of Browning's poems there were a hundred thousand for Martin Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, while the popularity of Mrs. Browning was as a wan shadow to the meridian splendour of Eliza Cook. Whoever will turn to the criticism of current reviews and magazines forty years ago will have no difficulty in understanding the diathesis described by Matthew Arnold as "on the side of beauty and taste, vulgarity; on the side of morality and feeling, coarseness; on the side of mind and spirit, unintelligence." Whoever will turn to nine out of the ten Anthologies, most in vogue before 1861, will understand, that the same instinct which in the Dark Ages led man to prefer Sedulius and Avitus to Catullus and Horace, Statius to Virgil, and Hroswitha to Terence, led these editors to analogous selections.
Making every allowance for the co-operation of other causes, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the appearance of the Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics in 1861 initiated an era in popular taste. It remains now incomparably the best selection of its kind in existence. Its distinctive feature is the characteristic which differentiates it from all the anthologies which preceded or have followed it. It was to include nothing which was not first-rate; there was to be no compromise with the second-rate; if its gems varied, as gems do in value, each was to be of the first water. With patient and scrupulous diligence, the whole body of English poetry, from Surrey to Wordsworth, was explored and sifted. After due rejections, each piece in the residue was considered, weighed, tested. And here Mr. Palgrave had assistance, more invaluable than any other anthologist in the world has had—that of the illustrious poet to whom the volume was dedicated. It may be safely said of Tennyson that nature and culture had qualified him for being as great a critic as he was a poet. His taste was probably infallible; his touchstones and standards were derived not merely from the masters who had taught him his own art, but from a wonderfully catholic and sympathetic communion with all that was best in every sphere of influential artistic activity. The consequence is, that a book like the Golden Treasury, especially when taken in conjunction with the notes, which form an admirable commentary on the text, may be said to lay something more than the foundation of a sound critical education. What the Golden Treasury is to readers of a maturer age the Children's Treasury is to younger readers. It is a great pity that such inferior works as many which we could name are allowed, in our schools, to supplant such a work as Palgrave's. The same exquisite taste and nice discernment mark his other anthologies, his selections from Herrick, and Tennyson, and, though perhaps in a less degree, his Treasury of English Sacred Poetry, and his recently published supplement to the Golden Treasury. It is probably impossible to over-estimate the salutary influence which these works have exercised.
There is no arguing on matters of taste, and exception might easily be taken, sometimes, to his dicta as a critic. But this at least must be conceded by everybody, that in the best and most comprehensive sense of the term he was a man of classical temper, taste, and culture, and that he had all the insight and discernment, all the instincts and sympathies, which are the result of such qualifications. He had no taint of vulgarity, of charlatanism, of insincerity. He never talked or wrote the cant of the cliques or of the multitude. He understood and clung to what was excellent; he had no toleration for what was common and second rate; he was not of the crowd. He belonged to the same type of men as Matthew Arnold and William Cory, a type peculiar to our old Universities before things took the turn which they are taking now. It will be long before we shall have such critics again, and their loss is incalculable.
As a scholar Palgrave was rather elegant than profound or exact, and, to judge from a series of lectures delivered by him as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, on Landscape in Classical Poetry, and afterwards published in a work which is here reviewed, his acquaintance with the Greek and Roman poets was, if scholarly and sympathetic, somewhat superficial. But he was getting old, and perhaps he had lost his memory or his notes. As a poet he was the author of four volumes, the earliest, published in 1864, entitled Idylls and Songs, and the latest, published in 1892, Amenophis; and other Poems. But his most ambitious effort appeared in 1882, Visions of England, written with the laudable purpose of stirring up in the young the spirit of patriotism. His poetry may be described, not inaptly, in the sentence in which Dr. Johnson sums up the characteristics of Addison's verses:—"Polished and pure, the production of a mind too judicious to commit faults, but not sufficiently vigorous to attain excellence." Perhaps they served their end in procuring for him the honourable appointment which he filled competently for ten years—that of the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. It may be said of him as was said of Southey, he was a good man and not a bad poet, or of Agricola, decentior quam sublimior fuit. But as a critic of Belles Lettres he was excellent.