often pompous jottings, half reverie, half autobiography, mainly devoted to the charm of his Kentish home or of his Italian holidays: they are not as solemnly sentimental as his poems. His novels are thin in story, abundant in moralizing, and luscious in sentiment. His criticism is profuse in the false attribution to others of precisely those faults which he failed to recognize in himself. His verse never frees itself from his admiration of Scott and Byron: but Scott never taught him the way to tell a tale, and Byron could not save him from invariably being ‘an uncompromising moralist’ (The Season). Not content with a talent for singing simply of country and countryside, he attempted to treat philosophic themes in epic and dramatic form. The Conversion of Winckelmann and Fortunatus the Pessimist are minor successes: but he had no gift for characterization and his narrative dwells inordinately on tales of sighing lovers ‘with teardrops trembling on the cheek’. Perpetually revolving truisms, he could never give them the semblance of new or valuable truths.
There is a portrait of Austin by Leslie Ward (‘Spy’) in the National Portrait Gallery.
The following is a list of Austin's works:
I. Verse. (a) Satires: 1. The Season (1861). 2. My Satire and its Censors (1861). 3. The Golden Age (1871).
(b) Narrative: 4. Randolph (1854). 5. The Human Tragedy (1862); this was withdrawn from circulation, and an expanded version appeared in 1876, and revised versions of this in 1889 and 1891. 6. Madonna's Child (1873); this became Act 2 of The Human Tragedy in 1876. 7. Rome or Death (1873); this became Act 3 of The Human Tragedy in 1876, giving to the original story a setting in the Garibaldian wars, and leading to an Act 4 which extends the setting to include phases of the Franco-German War. 8. Leszko the Bastard: a Tale of Polish Grief (1877), a reshaping of no. 4 above.
(c) Collections of Lyric and Narrative: 9. Interludes (1872). 10. Soliloquies in Song (1882). 11. At the Gate of the Convent (1885). 12. Love's Widowhood (1889). 13. English Lyrics (edited by William Watson, 1890). 14. Lyrical Poems (1891). 15. Narrative Poems (1891). 16. The Conversion of Winckelmann (1897). 17. Songs of England (1898). 18. A Tale of True Love (1902). 19. The Door of Humility (1906); this is a reflective poem in lyric verse with a shadowy narrative framework. 20. Sacred and Profane Love (1908).
(d) Dramatic Poems: 21. The Tower of Babel (1874 and 1890). 22. Savonarola: a Tragedy (1881). 23. Prince Lucifer (1887). 24. Fortunatus the Pessimist (1892). 25. England's Darling (1896); this is the laureate's diploma piece on Alfred the Great. 26. Flodden Field: a Tragedy (1903); this is the only one of the dramas capable of being staged, and was performed without success at His Majesty's Theatre in June 1903.
II. Prose. (a) Novels: 1. Five Years of It (2 vols., 1858). 2. An Artist's Proof (3 vols., 1864). 3. Won by a Head (3 vols., 1866).
(b) Political: 4. Russia before Europe (1876); second edition entitled Tory Horrors: a letter to Gladstone (1876). 5. England's Policy and Peril: a letter to Beaconsfield (1877). 6. Hibernian Horrors: a letter to Gladstone (1880).
(c) Critical: 7. A Vindication of Lord Byron (1869); this first appeared in The Standard. 8. The Poetry of the Period (1870), eight papers reprinted from Temple Bar (1869). 9. New and Old Canons in Criticism (Contemporary Review, 1881). 10. A Vindication of Tennyson (Macmillan's Magazine, 1885), a reply to Swinburne's Tennyson and Victor Hugo, later reprinted in The Bridling of Pegasus (no. 13 below). 11. The End and Limits of Objective Poetry, a preface to the second edition of Prince Lucifer (1887). 12. The Position and Prospects of Poetry, a preface to the third edition of The Human Tragedy (1889). 13. The Bridling of Pegasus (1910), a collection of essays written in the preceding thirty years, the most noteworthy being an attack on Wordsworth.
(d) Personal and Miscellaneous: 14. A Note of Admiration to the editor of the Saturday Review (1861), part of the quarrel about The Season. 15. The Garden that I Love (1894). 16. In Veronica's Garden (1895). 17. Lamia's Winter Quarters (1898). 18. Spring and Autumn in Ireland (1900), reprinted from Blackwood's Magazine (1894–1895). 19. The Poet's Diary (1904). 20. Haunts of Ancient Peace (1902). 21. The Garden that I Love, Second Series (1907). 22. Autobiography (2 vols., 1911).
[Austin's Autobiography; J. O. in the Athenæum, 7 June 1913; S. P. Sherman, On Contemporary Literature, 1917.]
AVEBURY, first Baron (1834–1918), banker, man of science,and author. [See Lubbock, Sir John]
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