The news & observer. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 1894-current, 1896-01-12
Alfred Austin, Poet, Lawyer
and Journalist.
THE MANNER OF MAN HE is
He is of a Sweet Trinity That
Uttered Nothing Base"
SOME SPECIMENS OF HIS WORK
Poetry to Him Has Been an Art to be
Served--Not a Great Bard but Fit
for Honors When Tenny-
sons are Mute.

youth and of late, since Tennyson died,
again inspired to poetic activity, has
been appointed poet laureate by
Queen Victoria. Thus, remarks the
Boston Transcript, does she celebrate
the beginning of 1896, and the fifty
| ninth year of her reign. Alfred Austin
is but two years older than her males
tvs reign, and will be sixty-one years
old on the Both day of next May
His father was a merchant in Head
ingley, a little town near Leeds, in
Yorkshire. There in the center of a
closely peopled district, whose scores
of collieries and where factories make
the external atmosphere anything but
poetic, the future laureate of Eng
land was born. 1t was, however,
more promising birthplace for a poet
than a far greater poet than Austin
had, and the parentage of Keats was
also less fortunate, as things are iudg-
ed But there was an old ruined alb
hey not far from Austin's birthplace,
and the Yorkshire walks have beauty
and nature for sensitive spirit. as
we'll as the view of struggling life
in the hard work and hard lives
which the boy must have seen. All
thse things were part of his training
and served him in his later life as a
journalist. Austin has had a hand in
the liveliest work of his times in Eng
lish journalism. He has been editor
of the National Review, and earlier a
regular writer for the Standard, serv-
ing that newspaper as special cores
pondent from Rome during the sittings
of the ecumenical council of the Nati~
can, and also as special correspondent
from the headquarters of King Will
helm during the Franco-Prussian war
To enter life this way was the path of
the self-made man. His father was
not rich His mother was sister of
Joseph Locke, civil engineer OF some
prominence in his time
Both of his parents were devout
Roman Catholics, and the youth was
educated ut Stoneyhurst, and at St.
Mary's college, Oscott. From these in
situations of the parental faith (Which
he afterwards driffed away FROM
Austin went to the University of Lon
don, where he took his degree at the
age of eighteen. When he was twen-
Il.
Z But life in the inner temple was not
profitable or pleasant to the young
man with IA hankering for the society
OF the muses.. BEGINNING with his
twenty -sixth year and continuing with
some natural Interruptions of mood or
intent, for twenty years, Alfred Aus
tin wrote much poetry and more prose
and came into position of high recog
milton among men of letters. He has
never had the popularity of many men
of vastly less ability. His work has
lacked the immediate effects, the sudden
leaps, the purposed dissertations or
the willfui emotional qualities OF sef-
eral Englishmen who have been nam
ed as possible laureates.
HIS THOUGHT IS PURE.
Alfred Austin is scarcely a great
poet, but he succeeds not unworthily
in one respect to the laurels of Tenny-
son, to whom they came from Words
wortfl's brow. Of all the three it may
be said they uttered nothing base
Austin has worked long and faithfully
and well, and is assuredly the only
poet now living in England who has
produced a great deal of whose work
it may be said that 1t has the inherent
quality of genuine distinction
Poetry has been to him an art to
be served, not means to be used. And
a critical judgment must applaud the
wise guidance, whoever may have in
fuenced Queen Victoria, which has
given to the closing years of the Vic
torian era Of poetry in England a
laureate who has preserved it's tradi
tions of absolute purity of poetic in
tent. Austin has never been diverted
from honest service of the muses.. even
by his own political feryors land he
has had as many as John Milton-vide
his prose, TONY Horrors" reply to
Gladstone's Bulgarian Horrors, y
Russia Before England in 1876,
"England's Policy and Peril" "A
Letter to Lord Beaconsfield," etc.
He has kept on persistently, going
up on Helicon to battle his brow in the
one cool brook that flows from the one
fountain, and there is little wonder
that in the long run fortune has given
him his hearts desire, and he has be
come poet laureate. 1t would be in
teresting to get hold of an essay writ
ten by Alfred Austin and published as
~ Solt VI AIS LioA OOOh VI
any serious Importance that survives
to-day. This was ''The Human Trag-
edy," and the essay was "On the Posi-
tion and Prospects of Poetry" and
must contain an early statement of
Alfred Austin's poetic creed. THE
Human Tragedy first appeared in
1862, when the ambitious beginner in
literature was twenty seven years of
age 1t appeared fourteen years later,
in q revised and much amended form
and with a dedication to his wife, in
"a sonnet of irregular form, closing
with the lines:
And lastly, Love, which from that low
perch sees
Chaste lips, and tender eyes, and
tresses brown,
And darting upward finds home with
these.
So stand we level in that high EN-
brace,
And l have all your glory on my
face.
"The Human Tragedy is story of
love and sorrow, and il is
not sufficiently free from the Shelley
influence to make it possible TO take
its occasional reminiscent Words
WORKMAN simplicities with the full
seriousness which poetry at its best
demands. 1T is written in eight-line