It must be admitted that sometimes, notably in Victorian narrative
verse, the fictitious poet's virtue is inclined to lapse into a
typically bourgeois respectability. In Mrs. Browning's _Aurora
Leigh_, for instance, the heroine's morality becomes somewhat rigid,
and when she rebukes the unmarried Marian for bearing a child, and
chides Romney for speaking tenderly to her after his supposed marriage
with Lady Waldemar, the reader is apt to sense in her a most unpoetical
resemblance to Mrs. Grundy. And if Mrs. Browning's poet is almost too
respectable, she is still not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath
with the utterly innocuous poet set forth by another Victorian, Coventry
Patmore. In Patmore's poem, _Olympus_, the bard decides to spend an
evening with his own sex, but he is offended by the cigar smoke and the
coarse jests, and flees home to
The milk-soup men call domestic bliss.
Likewise, in _The Angel in the House_, the poet follows a most
domestic line of orderly living. Only once, in the long poem, does he
fall below the standard of conduct he sets for himself.
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