Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer, was born at the New Foundry, Masbro’, in Rotherham parish, Yorkshire, on 17th March 1781. A shy and morbid boy, who proved a dull pupil at school, he worked in his father’s foundry from his sixteenth to his twenty-third year, and threatened to become a “sad drunken dog,” till the picture of a primrose in Sowerby’s “Botany” “led him into the fields, and poetry followed.” His “Vernal Walk,” written at sixteen, was published in 1801; to it succeeded “Night” (1818), “The Village Patriarch” (1829), “Corn-law Rhymes and the Ranter” (3d ed. 1831), and other volumes—collected in 1840 (new ed. 2 vols. 1876). He had married early, and sunk his wife’s fortune in his father’s business; but in 1821, with a borrowed capital of £100, he started as bar-iron merchant at Sheffield, and throve exceedingly. Though in 1837 he lost one-third of his savings, in 1841 he was able to retire with £300 a year. He died at Great Houghton, 1st December 1849. Elliott the poet is well-nigh forgotten. But Elliott the Corn-Law Rhymer is still remembered as the Tyrtæus of that mighty conflict whose triumph he lived to witness. He had been bred a “Berean” and Jacobin, yet he hated Communists, Socialists, and physical-force Chartists; he lies buried in Darfield churchyard; he left two sons Established clergymen. His whole life long he looked on the Corn-laws as the “cause of all the crime that is committed;” agriculturists, he maintained, “ought not to live by robbing and murdering the manufacturers.” On the other hand, “Capital has a right to rule the world,” and “competition is the great social law of God.” There are two poor memoirs of Elliott, by his son-in-law, John Watkins (1850), and by “January Searle”—i. e. George S. Phillips (1850).

Personal

  I do not remember the time when I was not dissatisfied with the condition of society. Without ever envying any man his wealth or power, I have always wondered why the strong oppress the weak.

  In a strange place I should never have recognized Ebenezer Elliott by his portrait. There is no good one of him. He is somewhat above the middle height. He is sixty-five, but not old-looking for his years. His hair is white, and his manner and tone, except when excited by those topics that rouse his indignation against cruelty and oppression, mild, soft, and full of feeling. Perhaps no man’s spirit and presence are so entirely the spirit and presence of his poetry…. Ebenezer Elliott has conversed too much with nature, and with men in their rough, unsophisticated nature, to have merged one jot of his earnestness into conventionalism of tone or manner. In society or out of it he is one and the same—the poet and the man.

  It seems curious to me that this man is not in these days better known. A more singular man has seldom existed,—seldom a more genuine. His first business speculation failed, but when about forty he commenced again, and this time fortune made amends for her former ill-treatment. His warehouse was a small, dingy place, filled with bars of iron, with a bust of Shakespeare looking down on the whole. His country-house contained busts of Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon. Here is a poet who earned a competence as an iron-merchant; here is a monomaniac on the Corn-laws, who loved nature as intensely as ever did Burns or Wordsworth. Here is a John Bright uttering himself in fiery and melodious verse,—Apollo with iron-dust on his face, wandering among the Sheffield knife-grinders!

  No man could be more happy than Elliott in a green lane; though an indefatigable and successful man of business, he devoutly and devotedly loved Nature. If absolutely rabid when he wrote of the “tax-fed aristocracy”—sententious, bitter, sarcastic, loud with his pen in hand and class sympathies and antipathies for his inspiration—all evil thoughts evaporated when communing in the woods and fields with the God by whom the woods and fields were made; among them his spirit was as fresh and gentle as the dew by which they were nourished.

  Very shortly before his death his daughter was married to John Watkins, his biographer. Elliott had a family of thirteen children, most of whom, together with his wife, survived him. Elliott was a small, meek-looking man. Though engaged in many almost revolutionary movements, and though once in danger of prosecution, he was really conservative by nature, and brought up two of his sons as clergymen of the established church. It was only under a burning sense of injustice that he acted as he did…. As a speaker, Elliott was practical and vigorous, though at times given to extravagant statements. A bronze statue, by Burnard of London, subscribed for by the working men of Sheffield, was erected at a cost of 600l. in the market-place of that town, in 1854, to the memory of Elliott. Landor wrote a fine ode on the occasion. The statue was afterwards removed to Weston Park.

General

  If the whole welkin hang over-cast in dizzly dinginess, the feeblest light-gleam, or speck of blue, cannot pass unheeded. The Works of this Corn-Law Rhymer we might liken rather to some little fraction of a rainbow: hues of joy and harmony, painted out of troublous tears. No round full bow, indeed; gloriously spanning the Heavens; shone on by the full sun; and, with seven-striped, gold-crimson border (as is in some sort the office of Poetry) dividing Black from Brilliant: not such; alas, still far from it! Yet, in very truth, a little prismatic blush, glowing genuine among the wet clouds; which proceeds, if you will, from a sun cloud-hidden, yet indicated that a sun does shine, and above vapours, a whole azure vault and celestian firmament stretch serene. Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless true, that here we have once more got sight of a Book calling itself Poetry, yet which actually is a kind of Book, and no empty pasteboard Case, and simulacrum or “ghost-defunct” of a Book, such as is too often palmed on the world, and handed over Booksellers’ counters, with a demand of real money for it, as if it too were a reality. The speaker here is of that singular class, who have something to say; whereby, though delivering himself in verse, and in these days, he does not deliver himself wholly in jargon, but articulately, and with a certain degree of meaning, that has been believed, and therefore is again believable.

  Ebenezer Elliott does—not only now and then, but often—ruralize; with the intense passionateness of a fine spirit escaping from smoke and slavery into the fresh air of freedom—with the tenderness of a gentle spirit communing with Nature in Sabbath-rest. Greedily he gulps the dew of morn, like a man who has been long suffering from thirst drinking at a wayside well. He feasts upon the flowers—with his eyes, with his lips; he walks along the grass as if it were cooling to his feet. The slow typhus fever perpetual with townsmen is changed into quick gladsome glow, like the life of life. A strong animal pleasure possesses the limbs and frame of the strong man released from labour, yet finding no leisure to loiter in the lanes—and away with him to the woods and rocks and heaven-kissing hills. But that is not all his pleasure—though it might suffice, one would think, for a slave. Through all his senses it penetrates into his soul—and his soul gets wings and soars.

  The time is gone by when the introduction of a reviewer could be of any avail to the Poet of the Poor. Ebenezer Elliott has taken the place to which he is entitled; his name is on the nation’s muster-roll of bards; the laurel-crowned have received the unwashed artificer into their fellowship; no future Johnson will edit the works of the British poets without a biography of the man of Hallamshire. Were he never to write another line, this collection of his poems, of which the third volume has just appeared, would be amply sufficient for his credentials. The public know this as well as we do. The verdict of those who are qualified to serve on such a jury is pronounced; the intellectual rank, as a poet, of Ebenezer Elliott is established.

  The man of all the self-educated poets, since the days of Burns, of the most original powers, the finest imagination, and the most copious and animated style.

  A man of true genius, “the poor man’s poet.”

  One of the most remarkable men of the present age is Ebenezer Elliott, the “Corn-Law Rhymer,” a poet whose productions are distinguished alike for boldness and originality, a singular strength and purity of diction, and a warm sympathy with the oppressed masses…. Elliott was for a long time neglected. His subjects, like those of Crabbe, whom in many ways he is like, are of a homely sort, emphatically human, such as, for some reason, the popular taste does not readily approve. He gives simple, earnest and true echoes of the affections. His poems, aside from their political character, breathe the spirit of a kind of primitive life, unperverted, unhackneyed, and fresh as the dews on his own hawthorne. Carlyle, Bulwer, and other critics, seeing in him incontestable signs of genius, at length handed him up to fame.

  The great ambition of Elliott is to thunder. He is a brawny man of nature’s own make, with more than the usual portion of the ancient Adam stirring within him; and he says, “I do well to be angry.” The mere sight of tyranny, bigotry, meanness, prompts his smiting invective. His poetry could hardly have been written by a man who was not physically strong. You can hear the ring of his anvil, and see the sparks fly off from his furnace, as you read his verse. He stoutly wrestles with the difficulties of utterance, and expresses himself by main force. His muscles seem made of iron. He has no fear and little mercy; and not only obeys the hot impulses of his sensibility, but takes a grim pleasure in piling fuel on the flame. He points the artillery of the devil against the devil’s own legions. His element is a moral diabolism, compounded of wrath and conscience.

  The Burns of Sheffield did not speak to the dead. The fire which he scattered was electric. It spread rapidly, it kindled in millions of hearts, it became the soul of the sinking multitude. It was slower to seize on the moist and comfortable spirits of the middle classes and master-manufacturers; but the progress of foreign competition soon drove even them into action against the landlord’s monopoly. The League arose. The prose-men took up the cry of the poet, and with material and ground prepared by him, went on from year to year advancing, by force of arguments and force of money, the great cause, till at this moment it may be said to be won. The prime minister of England pronounced the doom of the Corn-Law, and fixed the date of its extinction. All honor to every man who fought in the good fight, but what honor should be shown him who began it? To the man who blew, on the fiery trumpet of a contagious zeal, defiance to the hostile power in the pride of its strength, and called the people together to the great contest? In that contest the very name of Ebenezer Elliott has of late ceased to be heard. Others have prolonged the war-cry, and the voice of him who first raised it seems to be forgotten; but not the less did he raise it. Not the less does that cause owe to him its earliest and amplest thanks. Not the less is it he who dared to clear the field.

  Howsoever he may have been indebted to Burns’s example for the notion of writing at all, he has profited very little by Burns’s own poems. Instead of the genial loving tone of the great Scotchman, we find in Elliott a tone of deliberate savageness, all the more ugly, because evidently intentional. He tries to curse; “he delights”—may we be forgiven if we misjudge the man—“in cursing;” he makes a science of it; he defiles, of malice prepense, the loveliest and sweetest thoughts and scenes (and he can be most sweet) by giving some sudden, sickening revulsion to his reader’s feelings; and he does it generally with a power which makes it at once as painful to the calmer reader as alluring to those who are struggling with the same temptations as the poet. Now and then, his trick drags him down into sheer fustian and bombast; but not always. There is a terrible Dantean vividness of imagination about him, perhaps unequalled in England, in his generation. His poems are like his countenance, coarse and ungoverned, yet with an intensity of eye, a rugged massiveness of feature, which would be grand but for the seeming deficiency of love and of humour—love’s twin and inseparable brother.

  Had he been able to identify himself with the characters he described, or had he drawn from self, he would have evinced power little lower than Shakspeare—or Byron.

  His sky never shows the calm, clear, unclouded summer blue; some speck on the horizon, although no “bigger than a man’s hand,” ever predicates storm; and it is impossible to mistake Elliot’s moorlands for the Elysian fields. As a depictor of the phases of humanity, his portraits are almost all of one class; and with that class are identified his entire sympathies. Hence it is that he seems deficient in that genial spirit, which characterises more catholic natures; in those expansive feelings, which embrace society in all its aspects; in those touches which “makes all flesh kin.”

  Any one who reads his poems will not fail to note how closely his soul was knit to universal Nature—how his pulse beat in unison with her,—how deeply he read and how truly he interpreted her meanings. With a heart glowing for love of his kind, out of which indeed his poetry first sprung, and with a passionate sense of wrongs inflicted upon the suffering poor, which burst out in words of electric, almost tremendous power, there was combined a tenderness and purity of thought and feeling, and a love for Nature in all her moods, of the most refined and beautiful character. In his scathing denunciations of power misused, how terrible he is; but in his expression of beauty, how sweet! Bitter and fierce though his rhymes are when his subject is “the dirt-kings,—the tax-gorged lords of the land,” we see that all his angry spirit is disarmed when he takes himself out beneath the fresh breath of the heavens, in the green lane, on the open heath, or up among the wild mountains. Then he takes Nature to his bosom,—calls her by the sweetest of names, pours his soul out before her, gives her his whole heart, and yields up to her his manly adoration.

  It is hardly possible, without quotation, to give an idea of the rage and fury which pervade these poems. He curses his political opponents with his whole heart and soul. He pillories them, and pelts them with dead cats and rotten eggs. The earnestness of his mood has a certain terror in it for meek and quiet people. His poems are of the angriest, but their anger is not altogether undivine. His scorn blisters and scalds, his sarcasm flays; but then outside nature is constantly touching him with a summer breeze or a branch of pink and white apple-blossom, and his mood becomes tenderness itself. He is far from being lachrymose; and when he is pathetic, he affects one as when a strong man sobs. His anger is not nearly so frightful as his tears. I cannot understand why Elliott is so little read. Other names not particularly remarkable I meet in the current reviews—his never. His book stands on my shelf, but on no other have I seen it. This I think strange, because, apart from the intrinsic values of his verse as verse, it has an historical value. Evil times, and embittered feelings, now happily passed away, are preserved in his books, like Pompeii and Herculaneum in Vesuvian lava.

  Elliott’s imagination was ambitious, and imperfectly trained: he accordingly dealt with large and passionate themes, entering into them with complete abandon; and he was hurried on to passages of genuine inspiration; real heights and depths were within his range; heavenly lights alternate with nether darkness. Few of his longer poems, however, possess imaginative ordonnance; from the sublime he could pass to the turgid; from the pathetic to the pseudo-romantic; and therefore few of these longer poems can be read with satisfaction in each as a whole. Nothing of worth that Elliott wrote was caught out of the air; each poem had its roots in fact; but the colouring in his earlier pieces is sometimes extravagant: as he matured, his imagination gravitated from the romantic to the real. There are not many figures in English poetry drawn from real life worthier of regard than the Ranter, Elliott’s pale preacher of reform on Shirecliffe height, and his Village Patriarch, the blind lone father, with wind-blown venerable hair, still unbowed after his hundred years; though seeming coeval with the cliffs around, still a living and heroic pattern of English manhood.

  Anything more gentle, more femininely sweet, than his occasional poetical effusions, I really do not know. One is conscious of having met with a soul capable of the profoundest tenderness; and the loving, heart-stirring tones, are quite irresistible. Excessive, no doubt, he is everywhere; and we become the more convinced of the sincerity and naturalness of his political writings, when we see his habit of investing every character he has to do with, with his own passionate affections.

  Does not rank among high sonneteers. He was one of the most convinced opponents of the legitimate or Petrarcan sonnet, and a strong advocate for the Spenserian.

  His heart was like the sea anemone, that, warmed by the summer sun, unfolds its wealth of colour in the rock-pool by the sea; but touched by the rude hand of man shrinks into unloveliness, and clings with grim fierceness to the rock. And yet even when stung into concentration by the reflection of “what man has made of man,” his bitterness is that of a tender heart wrought upon by evils which it cannot ignore, but which it feels itself powerless to overcome.

  He was, however, a very good specimen of the manly, natural representative of the common people, the backbone of the nation—whose local fame is an advantage to his country, and who if he does not escape some of the mistakes natural to limited education and horizon, is far above the tragic folly of those who believe that everything that is wrong can be set right, and prosperity and universal good secured by act of Parliament.

  It is difficult to fix the poetic place of Elliott, for the reason that there is no known definition of poetry which does not suggest and require additions and deductions, and the further reason that he is so different at different times that one cannot but hesitate in the attempt to determine his actual form and pressure. To say that he has written badly is only to say what has been said over and over again of Burns and Byron. But neither Burns nor Byron ever wrote so badly as he, nor with such persistence. Unlike their bad writing, which was accidental, his bad writing seems to have resulted from the system that he pursued, partly, no doubt, through ignorance, but more through obstinacy—the obstinacy which mistakes itself for originality. He was not so much an uneducated poet as a mis-educated poet. He may have read only masterpieces, as he claimed, but if so he read them amiss, since he learned nothing from them. His admiration of Byron, which was life-long, was of Byron at his worst, for Byron taught him to rail and curse, not to reflect and meditate…. He has no narrative talent. The movement of his verse, which was uncertain, was perpetually wasting itself in needless digressions—noisy with exclamations, and turbid with the sediments of passion.

  He is a violent and crude thinker, with more smoke than fire in his violence, though not without generosity of feeling now and then, and with a keen admiration of the scenery—still beautiful in parts, and then exquisite—which surrounded the smoky Hades of Sheffield.

  Was obviously born with a true delight in Nature and with some power of observation. But his work as a poet was marred—in one way by hasty indifference to finish and concentration, in another by the crude unscrupulous violence with which his political views were rendered: an atmosphere at all times asphyxiating to poetry.

  Though he probably had more of the “root of the matter” in him than any man living at that time save Tennyson and Browning, it almost necessarily excluded by the self-chosen narrowness of his themes and by their fiercely polemical treatment from any prominent place in such a chronicle as this. One might almost wish that the Corn-Laws had been repealed twenty years earlier, in order to see how it might then have fared with Elliott’s poetic development, were it not that in that case he would probably never have sung at all.