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Hemans' Passion JASON R. RUDY Hemans' Passion SHE MAY HAVE BEEN, BUT FELICIA HEMANS' VICTORIAN CRIT most most SENTIMENTALics seemed struck, and impressed, by her consistent lack of passion. "She is no sibyl, tossed to and fro in the tempest of furious excite ment," writes George Gilfillan in 1849, "but ever a 'deep, majestical, and high-souled woman'?the calm mistress of the highest and stormiest of her emotions."1 William Michael Rossetti draws attention in 1878 toHemans' " keen sense of restraint, her [a]ptitude and delicacy in versification, and a harmonious balance in the treatment of [her] subject."2 And in his 1848 Fe male Poets ofGreat Britain, Frederic Rowton offersmuch the same: Diction, manner, sentiment, passion, and belief are in her as delicately rounded off'asare the bones and muscles of theMedicean Venus. There is not a harsh or angular line in her whole mental contour. I do not know a violent, spasmodic, or contorted idea in all her writings; but every page is full of grace, harmony, and expressive glowing beauty.3 as Hemans' contemporaries similarly noted the poet's reserve, in Francis Jeffrey's important review of 1829: It is and singularly sweet, elegant, tender?touching, perhaps, and contemplative, rather than vehement and overpowering; and not only finished an even throughout with exquisite delicacy, and severity of execution, but informed with a purity and loftiness of feeling, and a certain sober and humble tone of indulgence and piety, which must satisfy all judgments, and allay the apprehensions of those who are most afraid of the passionate exaggerations of poetry.4 This essay has benefited immeasurably from ongoing exchanges with Emma Mason. Sin cere as thanks go well to Carolyn Williams, Jonah Siegel, Charles LaPorte, and Barry V. Quails. i. George Gilfillan, "Felicia Hemans," A Second Gallery of Literary Portraits (1849; NY: D. Appleton & Co., 1859) 229-39 (230). 2. William Michael Rossetti, Lives of Famous Poets (London: E. Moxon, 1878) 347. 3. Frederic Rowton, The Female Poets ofGreat Britain (1848; Philadelphia: Henry C. Baird, 1853) 386. Francis 4. Jeffrey,Review, Records ofWoman: with other Poems and The Forest Sanctuary: with other Poems, by Felicia Hemans, Edinburgh Review 50 (October, 1829): 32-47 (34). SiR, 45 (Winter 2006) 543 544 JASON R. RUDY Not passion, then, but delicate versification; not "spasmodic" in style, but recent on harmonious. Much important criticism has focused what seems to be Hemans' gushing overflow of powerful feeling.5 Less has been said about the peculiar tendency of Victorian and late-Romantic critics to praise Hemans specifically not for overflowing with powerful feeling. with Arthur seem to Along Symons, nineteenth-century readers have val ued Hemans' "idealisation of the feelings" precisely insofar as it escapes a "the grip of strong thought or vital passion."6 We will consider shortly the specific mechanisms Hemans employs to verses. want to restrain the passion of her I suggest first, however, that in so Hemans in a movement restraining passion, participates gaining strength an through the 1820s, early manifestation of the confrontation Richard Hengist Home elaborates in his 1844 New Spirit of theAge, the "poetical reason antagonisms" between and passion.7 Hemans' formal and thematic restraint aligns her with conservative cultural critics of her time such as Thomas Love Peacock, who in 1820 disparages "the rant of unregulated passion, thewhine of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious senti "8 ment. Invectives inspired by the passionate works of Byron, Scott, and those who tried to imitate them swelled into broad cultural critiques de manding restraint.John Keble lays out one of themore influential of these in to arguments 1827, gesturing what would become the Tractarian doc trine of reserve and calling for "a sober standard of feeling." Keble warns of the "excitement" in a modern poetry "sought after with morbid eager ness."9 He later dilates on this view in his "Inaugural Oration" of 1832, the as at art first of Keble's lectures Professor of Poetry Oxford: "the glorious of Poetry [is] a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man: which gives to secret to healing relief mental emotion, yet without detriment modest " 5. On Hemans as a poetess, see in particular Isobel Armstrong, 'AMusic of Thine Own': Women's Poetry?an Expressive Tradition?" in Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (NY and London: Routledge, 1993), especially 318?32; Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets (Charlottesville and London: UP of Virginia, 1992) 8-44; Emma Mason, "Felicia Hemans" in Women Poets of theNineteenth Century (Plymouth: Northcote, 2005); Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (NY and London: Routledge, 1993) 123?43; and Susan J. Wolfson, "'Domestic Affections' and 'the Spear of Minerva'" in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: U of Penn P, 1994) 128-66. 6. Arthur Symons, The Romantic Movement inEnglish Poetry (London: Archibald Constable and Co., 1909) 295. 7. Richard Hengist Home, A New Spirit of theAge, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1844) 2: 283. 8. Thomas Love Peacock, "The Four Ages of Poetry" [1820], Memoirs of Shelley and Other Essays and Reviews, ed. Howard Mills (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970): 117?32 (129). 9. John Keble, The Christian Year: Thoughts in Versefor theSundays and Holidays Throughout the Year (1827; Oxford: John Henry and James Parker, 1858) iii. HEMANS' PASSION 545 reserve: and, while giving scope to enthusiasm, yet rules itwith orderand due control."That Keble delivered this lecture in the year of the great re form is by no means coincidental; Keble's anxiety regarding the fallout from political change translates into a theory of poetry resonant with the concerns of his conservative peers: "the functions of noble poetry and good are intertwined."10 citizenship," Keble affirms, "closely Contrary to such reasoned order and control, however, poets like Byron to to re and Scott seemed their contemporaries have thrown intellectual serve to the wind, and to have become absurdly famous as a result. John we Wilson complains in 1830 that in the poetry "of our own age, miss the principle of Intellectual strength."11Henry Taylor echoes Wilson in 1834, to whom came more . than a mocking those poets "[a] feeling easily reflection."12 Intellectual reflection is not what poems like the Corsair and the Bride ofAbydos are about, Francis Jeffrey argued in 1814; they picture "enchant and readers' instead "the stronger passions," feelings that agonise" or minds, providing alternately "divine inspiration, demoniacal posses sion."13 It is such passionate enchantment and agony, finally, that Hemans' seems to and Victorian and late-Romantic readers poetry entirely avoid, heralded her work because it does not conjure "demoniacal pos " precisely session. Hemans' style of reasoned feeling gained in popularity as the appetite for In a writer for the Byron's temperamental passion waned. August, 1819, Edinburgh Monthly Review announced the collapse of Byron's popularity, explaining that the desire for passionate verse "has now cooled," "[t]he multitude have had enough": Mental is like bodily excitement; whatever produces itwill, by repeti even . an tion, lose its power of causing sensation. By exhibition of passions far beyond what we ought at least to sympathise with, [By ron] at once gloried in the field of his proper strength, and wooed and won . .But even that darling popularity. this concentrated poetry has lost its pungency; and passion the most maddening lies tranquil in boards, a brutumfulmen [dulled thunderbolt], on the bookseller's table.14 on io. Kehle's Lectures Poetry, 1832-1841, 2 vols., trans. Edward Kershaw Francis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912) 1: 22, 14; my emphasis. 11. [JohnWilson], Rev., The Christian Year, by John Keble, Blackwood's 27 (June, 1830): 833-48 (835). van 12. Henry Taylor, Philip Artevelde: A Dramatic Romance, 2 vols., 2nd edition (London: Edward Moxon, 1834) 1: xii. a a 13. [Francis Jeffrey],Rev., The Corsair: Tale and The Bride ofAbydos: Turkish Tale, by Lord Byron, Edinburgh Review 23 (April, 1814): 198-229 (198). 14. Rev., Tales and Historic Scenes in Verse, by Felicia Hemans, Edinburgh Monthly Review 2 (August, 1819): 194-209 (195-96). 546 JASON R. RUDY That 1819 saw Byron's verses lying unread in British bookshops isn't quite true, but itmay have become more true by 1823, when the poet com plained to Thomas Moore of being "as low in popularity and bookselling as any writer can be."15 Thus the EMR was proved right in predicting Byron's fall from grace, temporary as itmay have been, just as itwas in the same future success of a predicting?in very essay?the young poetess of the day, Felicia Hemans: "Poetic nobility she has already attained; nev ertheless her honours may yet be farmore distinguished and illustrious" (209). To the writer in the EMR, Hemans' ascent and Byron's fall are a natural pairing, for Hemans capitalizes on precisely the quality Byron was seen most to lack: restraint. In Hemans' verses, the EMR notes approv ingly, there is to be found not even a single example of "inflated epithets . sense ... a an sound without hobbling measure, unseemly rhyme" (208); the poetry, in its execution at least, is flawless. And most important, it is nothing like Byron's. Itwas a set of opinions thatwould be repeated in various guises through out the 1820s. Critics praised Hemans' innate sense of balance in direct contrast to In this narrative of the
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