Richard Monckton Milnes

Richard Monckton Milnes (1809-1885). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The Right Honourable  The Lord Houghton  FRS
Personal details
Born	19 June 1809 London, England
Died	11 August 1885 Vichy, France
Nationality	English
Political party	Tory, Whig
Spouse(s)	Hon. Annabel Crewe (died 1874)
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge

Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton FRS (19 June 1809 - 11 August 1885) was an English poet, man of letters, and politician.

Life

Overview

Milnes, son of Robert (known as "single-speech") Milnes, was born in London, and educated privately and at Cambridge. He sat in the House of Commons for Pontefract from 1837 to 1863, when he was raised to the Peerage. His interests were, however, mainly literary and philanthropic, and it was said of him that he "knew everybody worth knowing at home and abroad;" and his sympathies being of the widest, he was able to bring together the most opposite extremes of life and opinion. He championed the cause of oppressed nationalities, and of the abolition of slavery. He published many volumes of poetry, among which were Poetry for the People (1840) and Palm Leaves (1848). He also wrote a Life of Keats, and various books of travels.

Family

Milnes was born in Bolton Street, Mayfair, London, the only son of Robert Pemberton Milnes (1784-1858) of Fryston Hall, near Wakefield, by Hon. Henrietta Maria (Monckton), 2nd daughter of the 4th Viscount Galway. His father achieved some distinction. Born in 1784, eldest son of Richard Slater Milnes, M.P. for York, by Rachel, daughter of Hans Busk of Leeds, he was educated at a private school in Liverpool and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had a brilliant career, earning a B.A. in 1804. In 1806, at the age of twenty-two, he became M.P. for Pontefract, and on 15 April 1807 he defended the Duke of Portland's administration in a remarkable speech, which was long remembered. In October 1809 he declined the offer of a seat in Mr. Perceval's administration, and retiring to Yorkshire as a country gentleman led the politics of the county, supporting catholic emancipation and opposing the repeal of the corn laws. After paying a brother's debts he found himself forced to reside abroad, chiefly at Milan and Rome, for several years from 1829. In 1831 he travelled in southern Italy, and afterwards printed the journal of his tour for private circulation. He was highly popular in society, but of a fastidious nature, and he refused a peerage offered by Lord Palmerston in 1856. He died on 9 November 1858.

Youth and education

Monckton Milnes, who was delicate as a child, was educated at Hundhill Hall school, near Doncaster, and then privately, until in October 1827 he was entered as a fellow-commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge. There he owed much to the influence of his tutor, Connop Thirlwall, later bishop of St. Davids, and without great academic success he won notice.

A conspicuous member of the association known as the "Apostles",’ he was intimate with Tennyson, Hallam, Thackeray, and other promising men of his time; he spoke often and well at the Union Debating Society, and was a fair amateur actor. He also contributed occasional reviews and poems to the Athenæum. In December 1829, on the invitation of F.H. Doyle and W.E. Gladstone, he went with Hallam and Thomas Sunderland as a deputation from the Cambridge to the Oxford Union Society, to argue the superiority of Shelley as a poet to Byron. He earned an M.A. in 1831.

Early adulthood

On leaving Cambridge, Milnes went to London, attended classes at the recently founded University College, Gower Street, and associated with Thomas Campbell, F.D. Maurice, John Sterling, and others. After travelling in Germany, where he spent some time at the university of Bonn, he went to Italy and became popular in Italian society. He visited Landor at Florence. With Christopher Wordsworth he made a tour in Greece, and afterwards described it in a volume of poetical Memorials (London, 1834), which drew praise from Christopher North. Returning to England in 1835, he began his life in London society in the following year.

In spite of certain foreign manners which at first made him enemies, his social and literary qualities, the number and variety of his friendships, and a kind of bland audacity, obtained him an entrance into the best circles, in particular to Lansdowne, Holland, and Gore Houses, then recognised salons. He was a constant guest at Samuel Rogers's breakfast-parties in St. James's Place, and he began himself to give parties of a similar but more comprehensive nature in the rooms he took at 26 Pall Mall in the spring of 1837.

Both then and afterwards it was notoriously Milnes's pleasure to bring together men of widely different pursuits, opinions, and social position, and no one was unwelcome who had any celebrity, or was likely to attain it. He abounded in friendliness, but his sympathies were broad rather than deep. Naturally generous and always ready to offer his help, he found a romantic pleasure of his own in giving it.

In society, where he found his chief occupation and success, especially as an after-dinner speaker, he was always amusing, and many stories were told of his humorous originality. But he was eminently a dilettante; while his interests were wide, he shirked the trouble necessary for judgments other than superficial. He had many fine tastes and some coarse ones.

Political career

In the general election in June 1837 Milnes became conservative M.P. for Pontefract, and in the following December made a successful maiden speech. But he afterwards adopted a serious and at times pompous vein which was not appreciated; and although he was a warm advocate of several useful measures, he failed to make any mark as a politician. In 1839 he published a speech he had delivered on the question of the ballot, and a pamphlet on Purity of Election.

He often visited the continent, and increased his acquaintance with men of note, meeting in 1840 King Louis-Philippe, De Tocqueville, Lamartine, and others. With Guizot he kept up a correspondence on English politics. His interest in foreign affairs led him to expect office, and he was disappointed at not receiving a place in Peel's ministry in 1841. He did much to secure the passing of the Copyright Act, and he introduced a bill for establishing reformatories for juvenile offenders. In Irish questions he urged a scheme for endowing catholic concurrently with Anglican clergy, as likely to aid in averting a repeal of the union.

On Peel's conversion to free trade, Milnes, who had hitherto supported him, unlike the other Peelites who formed a separate party, joined the liberals. In 1848 he went to Paris to see something of the revolution, and to fraternise with both sides. On his return he wrote, as a Letter to Lord Lansdowne, 1848, a pamphlet on the events of that year, in which he offended the conservatives by his sympathy with continental liberalism, and in particular with the struggle of Italy against Austria. The pamphlet excited some controversy and much hostile criticism, which came to a head in a leading article in the Morning Chronicle, written by George Smythe, afterwards Lord Strangford, whom, in December 1845, Peel had preferred to Milnes for the under-secretaryship for foreign affairs. Milnes, who was coarsely handled in the article, at once challenged the writer; but Smythe made an apology, and it was accepted.

Literary career

Milnes had meanwhile continued his efforts as a writer. In December 1836 he had assisted Lord Northampton to prepare The Tribute, a Christmas annual, for which he obtained contributions from his friends, in particular from Tennyson. After some hesitation, the latter sent Milnes the stanzas which afterwards formed the germ of Maud.

He published 2 volumes of verse in 1838, and a 3rd in 1840. His poems excited some public interest, and a few of them became popular, especially when set to music. In the Westminster Review he wrote a notice of the works of Emerson, who sent him a friendly acknowledgment. In the controversy over the anglo-catholic revival he supported the movement in his One Tract More, by a layman (1841), a pamphlet which was favourably noticed by Newman (Apologia, ch. ii. note ad fin.)

In the winter of 1842-1843 he visited Egypt and the Levant, where he was commonly supposed to have had numerous adventures, and in 1844 he published his poetical impressions of the tour in a volume entitled Palm Leaves. Milnes, who was always ready to assist any one connected with literature, at this time exerted himself to obtain a civil list pension for Tennyson, and he helped Hood in his last days, and on his death befriended his family. He also contributed several articles to the Edinburgh Review, and took an interest in the management of the Royal Literary Fund.

The Dictionary of Literary Biography says of Milnes: "A mediocre poet himself, he played a major role in rescuing John Keats's reputation from oblivion by writing the first biography of the great Romantic poet ." In 1848 Milnes collected and arranged various papers relating to Keats, and published them as the Life and Letters of the poet. Much of the material was presented to him by Keats's friend, Charles Armitage Brown. The memoir, greatly abbreviated, was afterwards prefixed to an edition of Keats's poems, which Milnes issued in 1854.

On 30 July 1851 Milnes married Hon. Annabel Crewe, younger daughter of the second Baron Crewe. They went to Vienna for the honeymoon, and proposed to visit Hungary; but the Austrian government refused the author of the pamphlet on the events of 1848 entrance into that kingdom. On his return Milnes resumed his literary work, and partly from disappointed expectations, partly from disagreement with either party, relinquished his practical interest in politics; he refused a lordship of the treasury offered him by Lord Palmerston, whom he now followed.

He revised Gladstone's translation of Farini's History of the Roman State; and in 1853 he and M. Van de Weyer, Belgian minister in London, established the Philobiblon Society, a small circle of eminent men at home and abroad, interested in rare books and manuscripts. Milnes edited its Transactions. During the Crimean war he addressed meetings on behalf of Florence Nightingale's fund, and in September 1855 published in The Times a poem on the English graves at Scutari. In 1857 he attended and spoke at the recently established Social Science Congress, over which he presided later on (1873) when it met at Norwich; and he warmly advocated the formation of mechanics' institutes and penny banks.

Lord Houghton

Milnes caricatured in Vanity Fair, September 1870. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

In July 1863 Milnes was at Palmerston's instance created Baron Houghton of Great Houghton, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Differences of opinion respecting the pronunciation of his new name were commemorated in J.R. Planché's poem in Punch (Locker-Lampson, Lyra Elegantiarum, 1891, p. 376). In the House of Lords Houghton spoke against the condemnation by convocation of Essays and Reviews, and in aid of the movement for legalising marriage with a deceased wife's sister. He was one of the few peers who eagerly supported the reform of the franchise, which he advocated at a meeting at Leeds, and, with John Bright, at a banquet at Manchester. To a volume of Essays on Reform (1867) he contributed an article on "The Admission of the Working Classes as a part of the Social System."

In 1866 he delivered the inaugural address at the opening of new rooms for the Cambridge Union Society. He was president of the group of liberal arts at the French Exhibition of 1867, when he spent some months in Paris, and met most of the leading statesmen of Europe. In 1869 he represented the Royal Geographical Society at the opening of the Suez Canal, and presented a report on his return. In 1873 he published, under the title Monographs, interesting recollections of some friends, the Miss Berrys, Landor, Sydney Smith, Wiseman, and others; and in 1875 an edition of Peacock's novels, with a preface.

In his later years Houghton's social qualities were given the fullest play. Both at Fryston and in London, at 16 Upper Brook Street, he was constantly entertaining his distinguished friends; and he continued to relieve genius in distress. In 1860 he befriended David Gray, and in 1862 wrote a preface to his poem, The Luggie. Milnes was also instrumental in making A.C. Swinburne known to the public, and he drew attention to Atalanta in Calydon in the Edinburgh Review. He knew every one of note, and was present at almost every great social gathering.

His wife predeceased him in February 1874. In 1875 he visited Canada and the United States, where he met Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, and was everywhere widely received by leading men, partly for the sympathy he had shown with the north during the civil war.

He succeeded Carlyle, who had been his lifelong friend, as president of the London Library in 1882. In May 1885 he took part in unveiling a bust of Coleridge in Westminster Abbey, and of Gray at Cambridge. His last speech was at a meeting of the short-lived Wordsworth Society in the following July.

He died at Vichy, France, on 11 August 1885, and on 20 August was buried at Fryston. He left 2 daughters and a son, who afterwards became lord-lieutenant of Ireland.

Writing

His poetry is of the meditative kind, cultured and graceful; but it lacks fire. Though he had not the depth of mind or intensity of feeling to make a great poet, his verse is the work of a man of high culture, graceful and refined, and a few of his shorter poems – such as "The Beating of my own Heart", and "Strangers Yet" – strike a true note which gained for them wide acceptance.

Houghton's poetical works are: 1. ‘Memorials of a Tour in some parts of Greece, chiefly Poetical,’ London, 1834. 2.‘Memorials of a Residence on the Continent, and Historical Poems,’ London, 1838, of which an enlarged edition appeared in 1844. 3. ‘Poems of many Years,’ London, 1838. 4. ‘Poetry for the People, and other Poems,’ London, 1840. 5. ‘Poems, Legendary and Historical,’ London, 1844, which included pieces previously published. 6. ‘Palm Leaves,’ London, 1844. He also issued several songs in single sheets. A collected edition in 2 volumes, with a preface and portrait, appeared in London in 1876.

His prose writings include, besides those noticed, pamphlets and articles in newspapers and reviews: 1. ‘A Speech on the Ballot, delivered in the House of Commons,’ London, 1839. 2. ‘Thoughts on Purity of Election,’ London, 1842. 3. ‘Answer to R. Baxter on the South Yorkshire Isle of Axholme Bill,’ Pontefract, 1852. 4. Preface to ‘Another Version of Keats's “Hyperion,”’ London, 1856. 5. ‘Address on Social Economy’ at the Social Science Congress, London, 1862. 6. ‘On the present Social Results of Classical Education,’ in F. W. Farrar's ‘Essays on a Liberal Education,’ London, 1867. He also edited various papers in the publications of the Philobiblon Society and the Grampian Club; and he wrote a preface to the ‘History of Grillion's Club, from its Origin in 1812 to its 50th Anniversary,’ London, 1880.

Critical introduction

by Robert Offley Ashburton Crewe-Milnes, Marquess of Crewe

In 1838 Henry Crabb Robinson noted in his Diary how Landor had maintained that “Milnes is the greatest poet now living in England.” Landor could be an exuberant critic; and even though he purposely ignored the last flickerings of Southey’s existence and Wordsworth’s barren old age, five years earlier Tennyson had published "The Lotos-Eaters" and "The Palace of Art"; while Paracelsus had lately shown careful critics that another new-comer had to be reckoned with. Still it is interesting to recall the verdict to a generation which has nearly forgotten Lord Houghton’s poetry, and remembers him principally as a witty and genial man of the world, and promoter of some useful public reforms during the first forty years of Queen Victoria’s reign.

Whatever germs of poetry were inborn in Richard Milnes were sure of sympathetic cultivation in the famous coterie of the late twenties at Trinity, Cambridge, where the three Tennysons, the two Lushingtons, Arthur Hallam, and Richard Trench talked and wrote. The devotion of the whole circle to Keats and Shelley, which produced the first English issue of Adonais, and dispatched Hallam, Milnes, and Sunderland to the Oxford Union as champions of its author’s art, was linked with an enthusiasm for Wordsworth scarcely less ardent, and doubtless in some respects corrective. Milnes was no copyist; but until the time came when Eastern travel gave him something of a new vision, and therewith something of a fresh manner, the influence of the older masters is not less patent in his work than in the earlier poems of Alfred Tennyson.

In the last year of his life, at each of 2 gatherings held in honour of Gray and of Wordsworth, he dwelt on the disadvantages under which the poets of sentiment labour in comparison with the supreme poets of passion and of imagery. As he himself admitted, any such classification of schools and of individuals must be arbitrary and imperfect; and no doubt qualitative analysis on these lines of such utterly different masterpieces as Lycidas, the Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, the two poems To Mary Unwin, and Ulysses, would not be easy. We may be certain, however, that Milnes would have numbered himself among the poets of sentiment, treading more nearly in the path of Wordsworth than any other. Indeed, with some of Wordsworth’s human sight, and touches of his sober emotion, and without ever plunging into the incredible bathos of Wordsworth at his worst, he now and then spoiled a stanza by a pedestrian phrase, or a cadence more befitting prose. One material limitation parted the disciple from the prophet.

Country-bred though he was, it was Milnes’s misfortune to possess little taste for country life or for rural pleasures; and while his Southern and Eastern poems exhibit some notable pictures of sky and landscape, it was into the hidden heart of man, not of Nature, that he strove to look, and the revelation of humanity that he desired to widen. He laboured in a special sense to make his work, in Matthew Arnold’s much-discussed phrase, “A criticism of life,” though he never professed to formulate a whole philosophy of man’s existence.

The poems of which he himself thought most — The Flight of Youth (which he placed first), Never Return, The Men of Old, The Long Ago, and Half Truth — are all poems of sentiment in his meaning of the word, and the notes of passion are rare throughout. Indeed in most of his thoughtful poetry the lights burn somewhat low; while all his life through he himself bubbled over with humour, and extracted continual enjoyment from the most varied scenes and from the most diverse social conditions. For what sounds like a paradox is indeed almost a commonplace — that utterance in verse often expresses a reaction of the soul against the moral and intellectual elements by which a man is known in his daily life. Never Return, a poem in blank verse of nearly 150 lines, and therefore too long for this Selection, describes a gathering of friends under an Italian sky, and the eternal conflict between the outlook of sanguine youth and the cooler philosophy of mature years. It is marked by singular grace of expression, and some fine landscape painting.

The memorials of Milnes’s travel in Greece and of residence in Italy have lost some of their freshness with the passage of time. The Greece of Byron is more remote from us than the Greece of Pericles, and the Brownings sang of Italy with fuller knowledge and deeper devotion; but the Eastern volume of Palm Leaves, as Lord Houghton himself came to see when he reissued his poetry, deserves a more lasting recollection. His travels in 1842 were not those of a Burton, or even of a Mr. Wilfrid Blunt; but it may be questioned whether any English poet has obtained a closer perception of the Near East, or of the spirit by which the followers of the Prophet live and move. Such poems as Mohammedanism, The Hareem, The Tent, some of the Eastern Thoughts, and the tales told in The Kiosk, remain vivid and authentic after all the turmoils and changes that have harassed the land which inspired them.

As might be anticipated amid a life of variety and movement, much of Milnes’s verse, and not a little of the most original, is of what is called the “occasional” type. The term is sometimes used with a note of depreciation, and the very highest poetry in the language rarely conforms to it; but no apology can be needed for appearance in the train of some of Milton’s and Wordsworth’s noblest sonnets, to say nothing of Burns or Cowper or Byron. Milnes’s Monument for Scutari, A Spanish Anecdote, the two sonnets on Princess Borghese, and his in memoriam verses on Dryden and Thackeray, Mary and Agnes Berry, and Mrs. Denison, are all excellent in their kind.....

Once only, in "The Brownie", did Milnes reveal a sombre power which makes that poem admirable in its genre and will keep it alive. The other and longer Legends and Narrative Poems are not specially noticeable.

Some may be tempted to ask whether the writer of poetry stamped by so competent a critic as Mr. Aubrey de Vere as “rich in fancy, grave-hearted, in an unusual degree thoughtful and full of pathos,” might not have climbed to great heights if, like Wordsworth and Tennyson, he had laid aside other ambitions and enjoyments, and devoted himself to imaginative labours.

Experience does not favour such a possibility. “Mute inglorious Miltons” may rest in the country churchyard, but not on the benches of the House of Commons. Quisque suos patimur manes, and it would be hard to name an instance where absorption in politics or business or society has affected either the quality or the volume of poetry belonging to the first class—using that phrase in an extended sense so as to include Hugo or Browning, as well as Dante or Milton. The fact is that the creative impulse is so powerful and so pleasurable to those who enjoy it even in small measure, that though it may sometimes dissipate itself in the sands of indolence, its flow can scarcely be diverted into another deep channel of active life. So while much unwanted verse goes to the printers, little poetry, if any, is left unwritten by those who can write indeed. And if Milnes issued no new volume after he was five-and-thirty, it was not through the expulsion of poetry from its throne by the pressure of other interests so much as through their admission by the partial abdication of poetry.

To some of his relatives public life seemed to be the sole rational pursuit for a clever man of his upbringing; but such pressure would not have operated but for the decay in himself of that lyrical faculty of youth which, in its constant occurrence and its ephemeral richness, always excited his wonder as a phenomenon and his sympathy as a personal incident. In his own stronger work the gift greatly transcended the mere outflow of musical verse; indeed, as Frederick Locker wrote after his death: “His poetry depended less on the way the thought was expressed than on the thought itself.”

But, as Houghton himself observed in 1876, “It is in truth the continuance and sustenance of the poetic faculty which is the test of its magnitude: when it grows with a man’s growth in active life, when it is not checked or smothered by the cares of ordinary existence, or by the successes or failures of a career, when it derives force and variety from the experiences of society and the internal history of the individual mind, then, and then only, can it be surely estimated as part of that marvellous manifestation of Art and Nature, the Poetry of the World.” These laurels cannot be claimed for Lord Houghton, and he would never have claimed them for himself. But at a time when many new lamps of verse are lit which are by no means beacon-fires, it is not amiss to rekindle the steady flame of his poetry by this selection.

Recognition

Towards the close of his life, Houghton, already a fellow of the Royal Society, honorary D.C.L. of Oxford, and LL.D. of Edinburgh, became an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, secretary for foreign correspondence in the Royal Academy, and a trustee of the British Museum.

His poem "Shadows" was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

Publications

Poetry

• Memorials of a Tour in Some Parts of Greece: Chiefly poetical. London: Edward Moxon, 1834.
• Memorials of a Residence on the Continent. . London: Edward Moxon, 1838.
• The Poems of Richard Monckton Milnes. London: Edward Moxon, 1838.
• Poetry for the People, and other poems. London: Edward Moxon, 1840.
• Memorials of Many Scenes. London: Edward Moxon, 1844.
• Palm Leaves. London: Edward Moxon, 1844.
• Poems: Legendary and historical. London: Edward Moxon, 1844.
• Poems of Many Years. London: Edward Moxon, 1844; Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1846.
• Selections from the Poetical Works of Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton. London: John Murray, 1863.
• The Poetical Works of (Richard Monckton Milnes) Lord Houghton. (2 volumes), London: John Murray, 1876; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1876. Volume I, Volume II.

Non-fiction

• The Influence of Homer: An essay which obtained the annual prize at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1829. Cambridge, UK: James Hodson, 1829.
• Social Relations of England and America. London: W. Clowes, 1867.
• Monographs Personal and Social. London: John Murray, 1873.
• Some Writings and Speeches of Richard Monckton Mills, Lord Houghton: In the last year of his life. London: privately printed at the Chiswick Press, 1888.

Juvenile

• Good Night and Good Morning: A ballad. London: Day & Son, 1859.

Collected editions

• A Selection from the Wofks of Lord Houghton. London: Edward Moxon, 1868.

Edited

• Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. (2 volumes), London: Edward Moxon, 1848. New York: Putnam,1848. Volume I, Volume II.
  • (with introduction by Sylvia Norman). London: Dent, 1969.

Letters

• T. Wemyss Reif, The Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton. (2 volumes), London: Cassell, 1890.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Poems by Richard Monckton Milnes

Love thoughts - Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton - Fred Butwell - www.anapta.no

1. Pastoral Song

See also

• List of British poets

References

•  Saunders, Thomas Bailey (1894) "Milnes, Richard Monckton" in Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 38 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 18-21 . Wikisource, Web, Jan. 30, 2018.

External links

Poems

• "Shadows"
• Milnes in A Victorian Anthology: "An Envoy to an American Lady," "The Brook-Side"
• Richard Monckton Milnes in the Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse: "The Sayings of Rabia," from "Ghazeles"
• Milnes in The English Poets: An anthology: "Mohammedanism," "The Flight of Youth," "Moments," "Half-truth," "Shadows," "Mrs. Denison," "The Brownie"
• Richard Monckton Milnes Houghton at PoemHunter (84 poems)
• Richard Monckton Milnes at AllPoetry (87 poems)

Prose

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Richard Monckton Milnes

Books

• Richard Monckton Milnes at the Online Books Page
• Richard Monckton Milnes at Amazon.com

About

• Richard Monckton Milnes in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Richard Monckton Milnes at NNDB
• Houghton, Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
• Richard Monckton Milnes timeline at Stanford.edu

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Milnes, Richard Monckton