JOHN LUCASBoth the Westminster Review and Nineteenth Century are weighty
authorities. Besides, the terms in which these noted journals praise Morris
make it clear why Morris would have thought himself a suitable candidate
for the Laureateship. Morris, it will be evident, was a public poet, one who
took on the big subjects - life, death, and most points in between - and
who came up with unexceptional answers to problems preoccupying late-
nineteenth-century thought. He was basically High Church, monarchist,
and Tory. His credentials for the post of Laureate were therefore impec-
cable. True, he was an uninspiring poet but that need not have counted
against him. It certainly did not count against Austin.
Nor would it have counted against William Watson, another frontrunner
and one who, like Morris, was eager to become Laureate. Watson came to
notice in 1885 when he published a series of sonnets in the National
Review. According to James G. Nelson, in these sonnets (called "Ver
Tenebrosum") Watson "for the first time decks himself in the robes of the
poet-prophet and lashes out at his country's unjust actions in the Soudan
and against its weak, indecisive response to Russia's hostile moves in
Afghanistan." 14 As an upholder of Tory values, the National Review would
have been pleased with a sonnet on the Liberal Gladstone - betrayer of
Khartoum and General Gordon, or so right-wing opinion had it - that
begins:
A skilful leech, so long as we were whole:
Who scann'd the nation's every outward part
But ah! misheard the beating of its heart.
Sire of huge sorrows, yet erect of soul.
Swift rider with calamity for goal,
Who, overtasking his equestrian art,
Unstall'd a steed full willing for the start,
But wondrous hard to curb or to control. 15
We have seen how Gladstone was drawn into replying to "Locksley Hall
Sixty Years Later." But as far as I know he kept silent about Watson's
public rebuke. Attacks on Gladstone's perfectly sensible policy over the
Sudan were widespread. If Gladstone read Watson's poem, he may have felt
that the phrase stating that he was "erect of soul" made up for the rest.
More likely, as an accomplished man of letters, Gladstone would have felt
that he had not much to fear from someone who began by describing him
as a leech with powers of farsightedness, then turned him into a horseman
aiming for calamity who ended up by missing it. (Surely this was the
opposite of what Watson intended to say.) Nelson honorably quotes W.B.
Yeats's dismissal of Watson's sonnets as fatally dependent on Milton and
Wordsworth and as "in no way new or personal," in hope of rebutting the
286