Born, in London, 1 Jan. 1803. Educated at Sandhurst. Midshipman in Mexican Navy, served in War against Spain, 1829. At conclusion of War went to U.S.A. Returned to England. Contrib., to “Monthly Repository,” under initials: M. I. D. Contrib. poem to “Athenæum,” 1828. Edited “Monthly Repository,” July 1836 to June 1837. Sub-commissioner to report on Employment of Children in Mines, 1843. Contrib., to “Howitt’s Journal;” to “Household Words,” June 1851. Married Miss Foggs, 1847. To Australia with W. Howitt, 1852; Commander of Gold Escort, Victoria, 1852. Commissioner of Crown Lands for Gold Fields, 1853–54; Territorial Magistrate, 1855. Returned to England, 1869. Substituted Christian name “Hengist” for “Henry.” Civil List Pension, 1874. Contrib., to “Harper’s Mag.;” “New Quarterly Mag.,” “Fraser’s Mag.,” “Longman’s Mag.,” and other periodicals. Died at Margate, 13 March 1884. Buried there. Works: “Exposition of the … Barriers excluding Men of Genius from the Public” (anon.), 1833; “Spirit of Peers and People,” 1834; “Cosmo de Medici,” 1837; “The Death of Marlowe,” 1837; “The Russian Catechism” [1837?]; “Life of Van Amburgh” (under pseud. “Ephraim Watts”) [1838]; “Gregory VII.,” 1840; “The History of Napoleon” (2 vols.), 1841; “Orion,” 1843 (6th edn. same year); “A New Spirit of the Age” (with Mrs. Browning and R. Bell), 1844 (2nd edn. same year); “The Goodnatured Bear,” 1846; “Memoirs of a London Doll,” 1846; “Ballad Romances,” 1846; “Judas Iscariot,” 1848; “The Poor Artist” (anon.), 1850; “The Dreamer and the Worker” (2 vols.), 1851; “Australian Facts and Prospects,” 1859; “Prometheus the Fire-bringer,” 1864; “The South-Sea Sisters” [1866]; “The Lady Jocelyn’s Weekly Mail,” 1869; “The Great Peacemaker” (from “Household Words”), 1872; “The Countess Von Labanoff” (from “New Quarterly Mag.”), 1877; “Laura Dibalzo,” 1880; “King Nihil’s Round Table,” 1881; “Bible Tragedies” [1881]; “Soliloquium Fratris Rogeri Baconis” (from “Fraser’s Mag.”), 1882; “The Last Words of Cleanthes” (from “Longman’s Mag.”) [1883]; “Sithron” (anon.), 1883. He edited: Black’s trans. of Schlegel’s “Lectures,” 1840; “Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer Modernised,” 1841; “Shakespeare’s Works,” 1857; L. Marie’s “Notes … on … Prize Essays on the Vine,” 1860.

Personal

  The late R. Hengist Horne passed away in a very faint adumbration of that high reputation he once enjoyed. From the early days of “the farthing Epic”—“Orion”—to the publication of the “Bible Tragedies,” is changes! No poet of this generation more lived his life than did “Orion:” he seems to have dwelt in, or at any rate visited all the habitable (and several of the unhabitable) parts of the globe.

  He was a good musician, he played excellently on the guitar, sang well and was a marvellous whistler. He was an expert swimmer. Horne had his affectations. When he went out to Australia he was “Richard Henry,” but he came back “Richard Hengist.” In the bush he had met a Mr. Hengist, whose name he took.

  I was in England at the end of 1882, and during the following year, and half of 1884; and, our acquaintanceship resumed, spent many evenings with the old man at his lodgings in Northumberland Street, Marylebone. Through the two winters he would cook our dinner at the stove in his sitting-room, priding himself on his cooking (he was very much of an epicure, an epicurean in his life), and we ate on what room was left by books and letters on a little round table before the fire. He had always good wine, supplied by an admiring friend, and we sat and talked of books or of his Australian life. He was proud of showing how strong, in spite of his years (his dated with the century), his physique still was; and one evening he showed me his bare foot, that I might see he was really web-footed. He had taken several prizes for swimming…. After reaching the “threescore years and ten,” he leaped from the pier at Eastbourne to give a lesson in swimming.

  In the last year or two of his life the veteran man of letters found his eyesight becoming defective; and finally he was almost blind; but in all other respects he was in great bodily and mental vigor up to the summer of 1883, when he contracted the illness of which he died. This mental vigor indeed caused him to chafe at the younger generation or two of readers who knew not “Orion,” or knew it but as a “farthing tradition;” and the old athlete was ever ready to back with a powerful body any quarrel into which a powerful but impatient intellect might lead him. There were but few among his intimates with whom he had not quarreled more or less; but one or two remain who cherish his memory for what was strong and noble and generous in the wayward old Titan.

  It was very characteristic of him that, during his lengthened stay in Australia, he sent nothing over to his wife, whom he had left behind, and who had to go back to her own family, but portraits of himself.

  He himself, with his incredible mixture of affectation and fierceness, humor and absurdity, enthusiasm and ignorance, with his incoherency of appearance, at once so effeminate and so muscular, was better than all his tales. He was a combination of the troubadour and the prize-fighter, on a miniature scale. It was impossible not to think of a curly white poodle when one looked at him, especially when he would throw his fat little person on a sofa and roll about, with gestures less dignified than were, perhaps, ever before seen in a poet of between seventy and eighty years. And yet he had a fine, buoyant spirit, and a generous imagination with it all. But the oddity of it, alas! is what lingers in the memory—those milky ringlets, the extraordinary turn of the head, the embrace of the beribboned guitar!… Horne’s physical strength was very extraordinary in old age. It was strangely incompatible with the appearance of the little man, with his ringletted locks and mincing ways. But he was past seventy before he ceased to challenge powerful young swimmers to feats of natation, and he very often beat them, carrying off from them cups and medals, to their deep disgust. He was nearly eighty when he filled us, one evening, with alarm by bending the drawing-room poker to an angle in striking it upon the strained muscles of his fore-arm. He was very vain of his physical accomplishments, and he used to declare that he was in training to be a centenarian.

Orion, 1843

  “Orion” will be admitted, by every man of genius, to be one of the noblest, if not the very noblest poetical work of the age. Its defects are trivial and conventional—its beauties intrinsic and supreme.

  From some cause, which to me has ever been a mystery, “Orion” has not become popular. It contains passages to which, for description, it is difficult to find anything superior; and the thought or idea carried through the whole never flags.

  His masterpiece, “Orion,” is a great poem, characterised by a severe majesty and an admirable breadth of effect.

  It is not true that “Orion” is Horne’s only work of value; but it is so much better than anything else of his, and so characteristic of him, that by all but students the rest may be neglected. And it is an example of the melancholy but frequently exemplified truth, that few things are so dangerous, nay, so fatal to enduring literary fame, as the production of some very good work among a mass of, if not exactly rubbish, yet inferior stuff. I do not think it extravagant to say that if Horne had written nothing but “Orion” and had died comparatively young after writing it, he would have enjoyed very high rank among English poets. For, though doubtless a little weighted with “purpose,” it is a very fine poem indeed, couched in a strain of stately and not second-hand blank verse, abounding in finished and effective passages, by no means destitute of force and meaning as a whole, and mixing some passion with more than some real satire. But the rather childish freak of its first publication probably did it no good, and it is quite certain that the author’s long life and unflagging production did it much harm.

  I confess that I have often tried to appreciate his Farthing Epic and other effusions, but I have laid the books down, wondering that such works should meet with appreciation, save on some principle of mutual insurance.

  “Orion” is Horne’s masterpiece. The philosophic thought clogs the epic movement, but the thought is weighty enough, and expressed with sufficient terseness and force, to be worthy of attention for its own sake. The verse is almost always good and sometimes excellent. Horne is indebted more to Keats than to anyone else. Sometimes he appears to echo him consciously; at other times the reminiscence is probably unconscious. But as Horne was always a bold and original thinker his discipleship was altogether good for him. The sonorous quality of his verse is partly due to his model; the meaning remains his own.

General

  With an eager wish to do justice to his “Gregory the Seventh,” we have never yet found exactly that opportunity we desired. Meantime, we looked, with curiosity, for what the British critics would say of a work which, in the boldness of its conception, and in the fresh originality of its management, would necessarily fall beyond the routine of their customary verbiage. We saw nothing, however, that either could or should be understood—nothing, certainly, that was worth understanding. The tragedy itself was, unhappily, not devoid of the ruling cant of the day, and its critics (that cant incarnate) took their cue from some of its infected passages, and proceeded forthwith to rhapsody and æsthetics, by way of giving a common-sense public an intelligible idea of the book.

  When you get Mr. Horne’s book you will understand how, after reading just the first and the last poems, I could not help speaking a little coldly of it—and in fact, estimating his power as much as you can do, I did think and do, that the last was unworthy of him, and that the first might have been written by a writer of one tenth of his faculty. But last night I read the “Monk of Swineshead Abbey” and the “Three Knights of Camelott” and “Bedd Gelert” and found them all of different stuff, better, stronger, more consistent, and read them with pleasure and admiration…. Mr. Horne succeeds better on a larger canvass, and with weightier material; with blank verse rather than lyrics. He cannot make a fine stroke. He wants subtlety and elasticity in the thought and expression. Remember, I admire him honestly and earnestly. No one has admired more than I the “Death of Marlowe,” scenes in “Cosmo,” and “Orion” in much of it. But now tell me if you can accept with the same stretched out hand all these lyrical poems? I am going to write to him as much homage as can come truly.

  I am not sure that in natural gifts he is inferior to his most famous contemporaries. That he here receives brief attention is due to the disproportion between the sum of his productions and the length of his career,—for he still is an occasional and eccentric contributor to letters. There is something Elizabethan in Horne’s writings, and no less in a restless love of adventure which has borne him wandering and fighting around the world, and breaks out in the robust and virile, though uneven, character of his poems and plays. He has not only, it would seem, dreamed of life, but lived it. Taken together, his poetry exhibits carelessness, want of tact and wise method, but often the highest beauty and power. A fine erratic genius, in temperament not unlike Beddoes and Landor, he has not properly utilized his birthright. His verse is not improved by a certain transcendentalism which pervaded the talk and writings of a set in which he used to move.

  Perhaps it can be said that the name of the late Richard Hengist Horne is more widely known, in this country, than his works. But, however this may be, it certainly is a fact that he is more particularly remembered by the lovers of Mrs. Browning as having been the one to first introduce her to the literary world. He lived to see that that was an honor indeed.

  I have always felt that R. H. Horne is one of the few modern poets likely to be remembered by future generations—at all events by the students of our literature—as having written really good and memorable poetry. I have never myself, indeed, been able thoroughly to sympathize with the almost unqualified eulogium which (if I remember rightly) Edgar Poe once passed upon “Orion,” although there is assuredly very much to admire in it. But in an age singularly unfruitful in English dramatic poetry of a high order, Horne’s “Cosmo de Medici” and “The Death of Marlowe” stand out as not unworthy of a place beside “Colombe’s Birthday,” “The Blot in the ’Scutcheon,” and “Pippa Passes.”

  Horne was a talented, energetic, and versatile writer. His epic and his early tragedies have much force and fire, but they are not born for immortality.

  Horne, in 1885, had already published his fine tragedy of “Cosmo de Medici,” in five acts, and “The Death of Marlowe,” in one act, works with more of the vigorous character and high poetic quality of the Elizabethan dramatist than anything that has been written since the Elizabethan days…. A man of indubitable genius he yet wanted that one element of genius, humour. Still he merited far more than he had of contemporary appreciation, and very much of his verse may rank with the very best of that of the nineteenth century poets…. I always think of Horne as one who ought to have been great, he came so near to it in his work, in the greatness and nobility of his best writings.

  It was a misfortune both for himself and for literature that his circumstances were not such as to take him out of the turmoil of earning his livelihood by the exercise of his really extraordinary talents. His ingenuity and inventiveness, which were almost without limit, were constantly in requisition to produce something remarkable. Had he been able to sit apart “out of the hurley-burley” and contemplate his best subjects in a philosophic spirit, concentrating his energies of mind on the production of the best result, we might have had greater work from him. As it is, it may be doubted whether he would not stand better with posterity if he had left, instead of a vast mass of varied and clever literature, only some dozen or so of lyrical poems, “Orion,” “Cosmo de Medici,” “The Death of Marlowe,” and “Judas Iscariot;” for these are in their own way masterly productions, and strong enough to bear each its burden of conscious instructiveness.

  He was a very remarkable poet for seven or eight years, and a tiresome and uninspired scribbler for the rest of his life. His period of good work began in 1837, when he published “Cosmo de Medici” and “The Death of Marlowe;” it closed in 1843, with the publication of “Orion,” and the composition of all that was best in the “Ballad Romances.” If any one wished to do honor to the name of poor old Horne—and in these days far less distinguished poets than he receive the honors of rediscovery—the way to do it would be to publish in one volume the very best of his writings, and nothing more. The badness of the bulk of his later verse is outside all calculation. How a man who had once written so well as he, could ever come to write, for instance, “Bible Tragedies” (1881), is beyond all skill of the literary historian to comprehend.