Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/803

Rh give of poetry which a whole generation of intelligent readers, including many like Miss Martineau, who were not easily moved, found the most moving poetry of the time. Perhaps we come a little nearer when we notice that one of the most individual traits of Mr. Procter's lyrics is a hearty æsthetic appreciation of horseflesh and wine. When we remember how sober he was in the actual enjoyment of both, his praise of them takes the character of an escapade, and this character seems in a way to fit his lyrics as a whole, and to account for the attractiveness they have for earnest and intelligent readers in a community which is getting more complex rather than more perfect. Such readers are repelled by a systematic revolt against what is indispensable, or a systematic pursuit of what is unattainable, but a short sincere musical cry interprets and relieves their passing moods of personal discontent, and the deeper undercurrent of social dissatisfaction that runs through most generous lives.

One of Mr. Procter's few irrepressible convictions was that the inequalities of an old civilization were too iniquitous to be borne without relieving them, and he quite consistently exhorted the community in verse to wholesale almsgiving, while in prose he wanted the few, who found it almost as hard as he did to be callous to distress, not to impoverish themselves to relieve the ratepayers. His own generosity took the form of secret and delicate assistance to the temporary distresses of people of his own condition. The editor has told the secret of an unasked loan of this kind to a friend whose wife was saved by the timely help, although Mr. Procter's own income had been largely reduced by his relievency from the Commission of Lunacy. In such cases he was always willing to act on the maxim qui prête donne, but it did not raise his opinion of human nature to find the maxim generally taken for granted by those he helped. There are plenty of useless people in the world who never get any good luck or deserve any, and hardly know a happy day, and yet when they excite themselves over human life in general, they say, as sincerely as they can say anything, how fine and admirable they think it all. Mr. Procter's life was full of good luck till he was over seventy, and full of good deeds till the last, and yet, whenever he got excited over human life as a whole, he always thought it a poor, sorry, contemptible thing, and said so with emphasis.

The literary character of the "English Lyrics" is as composite as that of the other poems. As Lord Jeffrey says in the admirable review of the "Sicilian Story," from which the editor has quoted largely, there are echoes of the Cavalier poets of the usurpation; the terrible verses on the Burial Club in 1839, now printed for the first time, seem to owe their motive to Dickens; but the manner is almost an anticipation of the imitators of Browning. "The Hebrew Priest's Song" reads almost like a very early work of Mr. Swinburne.

Mr. Procter was too sure of perception for a critic, who had best not be much wiser than the public, so that he can sit down with them to analyze and feel his way, and we probably lost little by his being too busy to respond to Jeffrey's endeavors to secure him for the staff of the Edinburgh. But the few fragmentary recollections of contemporaries, mostly written down after he was seventy-eight, deepen the regret which the classical life of Lamb, published when he was seventy-seven, left behind, that he did not put a complete account of his literary souvenirs on record. Now and then, as in the case of Carlyle (from whom there is a beautiful. letter on the life of Lamb), Mr. Procter's judgment is too straightforward to be suggestive, but in a hundred pages, more or less, there are not a few stories as good as this of Rogers. Mr. Wordsworth was breakfasting with him one morning, he said, but he was much beyond the appointed time, and excused himself by stating that he and a friend had been to see Coleridge, who had detained them by one continuous flow of talk. "How was it you called so early upon him?" inquired Rogers. "Oh!" said Wordsworth, "we are going to dine with him this evening, and" "And," said Rogers, taking up the sentence, "you wanted to take the sting out of him beforehand."

There is more than one appreciation as rare and gentle as this of Leigh Hunt. "He saw hosts of writers, of less ability than himself, outstripping him on the road to future success, yet I never heard from him a word that could be construed into jealousy or envy, not even a murmur. This might have arisen partly from a want of susceptibility in his constitution, not altogether from that stern power of self-conquest which enables some men to subdue the rebellious instincts which give rise to envious passions He had no vanity, in the usually accepted sense of the word, I mean, that he had not that exclusive vanity which rejects all things beyond