Thomas Lovell Beddoes by Alice Meynell

There are some writers whom the judicious reader forgets by name, with the express intention of clearing them away. For oblivion is not always a slovenly thing. It is sometimes directed with no slight care, and has regard to all the distinctive characteristics of the one to be forgotten, effacing him with every possible precision, good aim, and attention. Others, again, it is more convenient to forget in little companies, according to their ‘school'; and there is no great precision necessary for picking them off. You shoot, as it were, ‘into the brown', for they go close-ranked.

Of Beddoes it must be said that if he is to be virtually forgotten-and there is hardly a doubt as to that-the act has to be a single and separate one. And yet this measure of distinction is not quite fairly come by. He gains it chiefly because he wrote Elizabethan tragedy in the early nineteenth century, and so gained a kind of isolation. But inasmuch as he wrote couplets to be like Keats, and lyrics to be like Shelley, he might disappear with a batch, and need give no trouble. He was not without talent, and he should have our cordial pity for living in a time when the inspiration of English poetry was withdrawn. When-for a far longer period-this had befallen before, there had been no one living aware of the lapse. When Shelley and Keats were gone, Wordsworth and Coleridge at an end, Beddoes was aware of what had happened, and knew all the conditions in which his own life had come to pass. He may remind you of a poor rabbit that came to consciousness in the midst of a physiological experiment. Generally the anaesthetic lasts as long as the trouble. But Beddoes had the distress of being an Englishman during a pause of poetry that must have seemed a final loss to his solitary consciousness. We know the shortness of the time, but if the struggle of his dismay was violent, and if he caught at the past-the immediate past and the distant-with a frantic gesture, shall we deride him who did not know the future that is now our past? The gap hardly shows in our view of the mountain range of poets.