And so it befell, that amid the little cross-blasts of home squabbles
the sacred spark was fast going out. The poems written after he
settled at Penalva are marked by a less definite purpose, by a lower
tone of feeling: not, perhaps, by a lower moral tone; but simply by
less of any moral tone at all. They are more and more full of merely
sensuous beauty, mere word-painting, mere word-hunting. The desire of
finding something worth saying gives place more and more to that of
saying something in a new fashion. As the originality of thought
(which accompanies only vigorous moral purpose) decreases, the attempt
at originality of language increases. Manner, in short, has taken the
place of matter. The art, it may be, of his latest poems is greatest:
but it has been expended on the most unworthy themes. The later are
mannered caricatures of the earlier, without their soul; and the same
change seems to have passed over him which (with Mr. Ruskin's pardon)
transformed the Turner of 1820 into the Turner of 1850.
Thus had Elsley transferred what sympathy he had left from
needle-women and ragged schools, dwellers in Jacob's Island and
sleepers in the dry arches of Waterloo Bridge, to sufferers of a more
poetic class. Whether his sympathies showed thereby that he had risen
or fallen, let my readers decide each for himself. It is a credit to
any man to feel for any human being; and Italy, as she is at this
moment, is certainly one of the most tragic spectacles which the world
has ever seen.
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