Hemans' passion.(Felicia Hemans)(Critical essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-06

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SENTIMENTAL SHE MAY HAVE BEEN, BUT FELICIA HEMANS' VICTORIAN CRITICS seemed most struck, and most impressed, by her consistent lack of passion. "She is no sibyl, tossed to and fro in the tempest of furious excitement," 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 to Hemans' 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 Female Poets of Great Britain, Frederic Rowton offers much the same:



Diction, manner, sentiment, passion, and belief are in her as delicately rounded off as are the bones and muscles of the Medicean 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)

Hemans' contemporaries similarly noted the poet's reserve, as in Francis Jeffrey's important review of 1829:

It is singularly sweet, elegant, and tender--touching, perhaps, and contemplative, rather than vehement and overpowering; and not only finished throughout with an exquisite delicacy, and even 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)

Not passion, then, but delicate versification; not "spasmodic" in style, but harmonious. Much important recent criticism has focused on 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. Along with Arthur Symons, nineteenth-century readers seem to have valued Hemans' "idealisation of the feelings" precisely insofar as it escapes "the grip of a strong thought or vital passion." (6)

We will consider shortly the specific mechanisms Hemans employs to restrain the passion of her verses. I want to suggest first, however, that in so restraining passion, Hemans participates in a movement gaining strength through the 1820s, an early manifestation of the confrontation Richard Hengist Horne elaborates in his 1844 New Spirit of the Age, the "poetical antagonisms" between reason 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, the whine of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment." (8) Invectives inspired by the passionate works of Byron, Scott, and those who tried to imitate them swelled into broad cultural critiques demanding restraint. John Keble lays out one of the more influential of these arguments in 1827, gesturing to what would become the Tractarian doctrine of reserve and calling for "a sober standard of feeling." Keble warns of the "excitement" in modern poetry "sought after with a morbid eagerhess." (9) He later dilates on this view in his "Inaugural Oration" of 1832, the first of Keble's lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford: "the glorious art of Poetry [is] a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man: which gives healing relief to secret mental emotion, yet without detriment to modest reserve: and, while giving scope to enthusiasm, yet rules it with order and due control." That Keble delivered this lecture in the year of the great reform 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 citizenship," Keble affirms, are "closely intertwined." (10)

Contrary to such reasoned order and control, however, poets like Byron and Scott seemed to their contemporaries to have thrown intellectual reserve to the wind, and to have become absurdly famous as a result. John Wilson complains in 1830 that in the poetry "of our own age, we miss the principle of Intellectual strength." (11) Henry Taylor echoes Wilson in 1834, mocking those poets to whom "[a] feeling came more easily ... than a reflection." (12) Intellectual reflection is not what poems like the Corsair and the Bride of Abydos are about, Francis Jeffrey argued in 1814; they picture instead "the stronger passions," feelings that "enchant and agonise" readers' minds, providing alternately "divine inspiration, or demoniacal possession." (13) It is such passionate enchantment and agony, finally, that Hemans' poetry seems entirely to avoid, and Victorian and late-Romantic readers heralded her work precisely because it does not conjure "demoniacal possession."

Hemans' style of reasoned feeling gained in popularity as the appetite for Byron's temperamental passion waned. In August, 1819, a writer for the 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 it will, by repetition, lose its power of even causing sensation.... By an exhibition of passions far beyond what we ought at least to sympathise with, [Byron] at once gloried in the field of his proper strength, and wooed and won that darling popularity.... But even this concentrated poetry has lost its pungency; and passion the most maddening lies tranquil in boards, a brutum fulmen [dulled thunderbolt], on the bookseller's table. (14)

That 1819 saw Byron's verses lying unread in British bookshops isn't quite true, but it may have become more true by 1823, when the poet complained 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 it may have been, just as it was in predicting--in the very same essay--the future success of a young poetess of the day, Felicia Hemans: "Poetic nobility she has already attained; nevertheless her honours may yet be far more 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 approvingly, there is to be found not even a single example of "inflated epithets ... sound without sense ... a hobbling measure, an unseemly rhyme" (208); the poetry, in its execution at least, is flawless. And most important, it is nothing like Byron's.

It was a set of opinions that would be repeated in various guises throughout the 1820S. Critics praised Hemans' innate sense of balance in direct contrast to the poetics of the previous generation. In this narrative of poetic accomplishment, Hemans' aesthetic of restraint arrives just in time to relieve public exhaustion with Romantic overflow, Byronic cavorting, and gothic sensibility. A reviewer in 1820 thus presents Hemans as a kind of restrained Wordsworth: "[t]he verses of Mrs. Hemans appear the spontaneous offspring of intense and noble feeling, governed by a clear understanding, and fashioned into elegance by an exquisite delicacy and precision of taste." (16) George Bancroft notes in an 1827 omnibus review of Hemans' work that "[a] great deal has been said of the sublimity of directing the passions; we hold it a much more difficult, and a much more elevated task, to restrain...

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