see literature once more wedded to the stage, will, it can hardly
be doubted, lead to a revival of dramatic poetry. This will not,
of course, have any relation to the feeble lycean plays of the
hour--spectacular romances enshrined in ambling blank verse--but will,
in its form and substance alike, offer entertainment to other organs
than the eye. Probably the puritanic limitations which have so long
cramped the English theatre will be removed, and British plays, while
remaining civilised and decent, will once more deal with the realities
of life and not with its conventions. Neither the funeral baked meats
of the romantic English novel, nor the spiced and potted dainties of
the French stage, will satisfy our playgoers when once we have strong
and sincere playwrights of our own.
In religious verse something, and in philosophical verse much, remains
to be done. The wider hope has scarcely found a singer yet, and the
deeper speculation has been very imperfectly and empirically celebrated
by our poets. Whether love, the very central fountain of poetic
inspiration in the past, can yield many fresh variations, remains to be
seen. That passion will, however, in all probability be treated in the
future less objectively and with a less obtrusive landscape background.
The school which is now expiring has carried description, the
consciousness of exterior forms and colours, the drapery and upholstery
of nature, to its extreme limit. The next development of poetry is
likely to be very bare and direct, unembroidered, perhaps even arid,
in character. It will be experimental rather than descriptive, human
rather than animal. So at least we vaguely conjecture. But whatever
the issue may be, we may be confident that the art will retain that
poignant charm over undeveloped minds, and that exquisite fascination,
which for so many successive generations have made poetry the wisest
and the fairest friend of youth.
_1891._
TENNYSON--AND AFTER
Tennyson--and After
As we filed slowly out of the Abbey on the afternoon of Wednesday, the
12th of October, 1892, there must have occurred to others, I think,
as to myself, a whimsical and half-terrifying sense of the symbolic
contrast between what we had left and what we emerged upon. Inside,
the grey and vitreous atmosphere, the reverberations of music moaning
somewhere out of sight, the bones and monuments of the noble dead,
reverence, antiquity, beauty, rest. Outside, in the raw air, a tribe
of hawkers urging upon the edges of a dense and inquisitive crowd a
large sheet of pictures of the pursuit of a flea by a "lady," and more
insidious salesmen doing a brisk trade in what they falsely pretended
to be "Tennyson's last poem."
Next day we read in our newspapers affecting accounts of the emotion
displayed by the vast crowds outside the Abbey--horny hands dashing
away the tear, seamstresses holding the "the little green volumes" to
their faces to hide their agitation. Happy for those who could see
these things with their fairy telescopes out of the garrets of Fleet
Street. I, alas!--though I sought assiduously--could mark nothing
of the kind. Entering the Abbey, conducted by courteous policemen
through unparalleled masses of the curious, we distinguished patience,
good behaviour, cheerful and untiring inquisitiveness, a certain
obvious gratitude for an incomprehensible spectacle provided by the
authorities, but nothing else. And leaving the Abbey, as I say, the
impression was one almost sinister in its abrupt transition. Poetry,
authority, the grace and dignity of life, seemed to have been left
behind us for ever in that twilight where Tennyson was sleeping with
Chaucer and with Dryden.
In recording this impression I desire nothing so little as to appear
censorious. Even the external part of the funeral at Westminster
seemed, as was said of the similar scene which was enacted there nearly
two hundred years ago, "a well-conducted and uncommon public ceremony,
where the philosopher can find nothing to condemn, nor the satirist
to ridicule." But the contrast between the outside and the inside of
the Abbey, a contrast which may possibly have been merely whimsical
in itself, served for a parable of the condition of poetry in England
as the burial of Tennyson has left it. If it be only the outworn body
of this glorious man which we have relinquished to the safeguard of
the Minster, gathered to his peers in the fulness of time, we have no
serious ground for apprehension, nor, after the first painful moment,
even for sorrow. His harvest is ripe, and we hold it in our granaries.
The noble physical presence which has been the revered companion of
three generations has, indeed, sunk at length:
_Yet would we not disturb him from his tomb,_
_Thus sleeping in his Abbey's friendly shade,_
_And the rough waves of life for ever laid._
But what if this vast and sounding funeral should prove to have
really been the entombment of English poetry? What if it should be
the prestige of verse that we left behind us in the Abbey? That is a
question which has issues far more serious than the death of any one
man, no matter how majestic that man may be.
Poetry is not a democratic art. We are constantly being told by the
flexible scribes who live to flatter the multitude that the truest
poetry is that which speaks to the million, that moves the great
heart of the masses. In his private consciousness no one knows better
than the lettered man who writes such sentences that they are not
true. Since the pastoral days in which poets made great verses for a
little clan, it has never been true that poetry of the noblest kind
was really appreciated by the masses. If we take the bulk of what are
called educated people, but a very small proportion are genuinely fond
of reading. Sift this minority, and but a minute residue of it will
be found to be sincerely devoted to beautiful poetry. The genuine
lovers of verse are so few that if they could be made the subject of a
statistical report, we should probably be astounded at the smallness of
their number. From the purely democratic point of view it is certain
that they form a negligible quantity. They would produce no general
effect at all if they were not surrounded by a very much larger
number of persons who, without taste for poetry themselves, are yet
traditionally impressed with its value, and treat it with conventional
respect, buying it a little, frequently conversing about it, pressing
to gaze at its famous professors, and competing for places beside the
tombs of its prophets. The respect for poetry felt by these persons,
although in itself unmeaning, is extremely valuable in its results. It
supports the enthusiasm of the few who know and feel for themselves,
and it radiates far and wide into the outer masses, whose darkness
would otherwise be unreached by the very glimmer of these things.
There is no question, however, that the existence in prominent public
honour of an art in its essence so aristocratic as poetry--that is to
say, so dependent on the suffrages of a few thousand persons who happen
to possess, in greater or lesser degree, certain peculiar qualities
of mind and ear--is, at the present day, anomalous, and therefore
perilous. All this beautiful pinnacled structure of the glory of verse,
this splendid position of poetry at the summit of the civil ornaments
of the Empire, is built of carven ice, and needs nothing but that the
hot popular breath should be turned upon it to sink into so much water.
It is kept standing there, flashing and sparkling before our eyes, by a
succession of happy accidents. To speak rudely, it is kept there by an
effort of bluff on the part of a small influential class.
In reflecting on these facts, I have found myself depressed and
terrified at an ebullition of popularity which seems to have struck
almost everybody else with extreme satisfaction. It has been very
natural that the stupendous honour apparently done to Tennyson, not
merely by the few who always valued him, but by the many who might be
supposed to stand outside his influence, has been welcomed with delight
and enthusiasm. But what is so sinister a circumstance is the excessive
character of this exhibition. I think of the funeral of Wordsworth at
Grasmere, only forty-two years ago, with a score of persons gathering
quietly under the low wall that fenced them from the brawling Rotha;
and I turn to the spectacle of the 12th, the vast black crowd in the
street, the ten thousand persons refused admission to the Abbey,
the whole enormous popular manifestation.[1] What does it mean? Is
Tennyson, great as he is, a thousand times greater than Wordsworth? Has
poetry, in forty years, risen at this ratio in the public estimation?
The democracy, I fear, doth protest too much, and there is danger in
this hollow reverence.
The danger takes this form. It may at any moment come to be held
that the poet, were he the greatest that ever lived, was greater
than poetry; the artist more interesting than his art. This was a
peril unknown in ancient times. The plays of Shakespeare and his
contemporaries were scarcely more closely identified with the men
who wrote them than Gothic cathedrals were with their architects.
Cowley was the first English poet about whom much personal interest
was felt outside the poetic class. Dryden is far more evident to us
than the Elizabethans were, yet phantasmal by the side of Pope. Since
the age of Anne an interest in the poet, as distinguished from his
poetry, has steadily increased; the fashion for Byron, the posthumous
curiosity in Shelley and Keats, are examples of the rapid growth of
this individualisation in the present century. But since the death
of Wordsworth it has taken colossal proportions, without, so far as
can be observed, any parallel quickening of the taste for poetry
itself. The result is that a very interesting or picturesque figure,
if identified with poetry, may attract an amount of attention and
admiration which is spurious as regards the poetry, and of no real
significance. Tennyson had grown to be by far the most mysterious,
august, and singular figure in English society. He represented poetry,
and the world now expects its poets to be as picturesque, as aged, and
as individual as he was, or else it will pay poetry no attention. I
fear, to be brief, that the personal, as distinguished from the purely
literary, distinction of Tennyson may strike, for the time being, a
serious blow at the vitality of poetry in this country.
Circumstances have combined, in a very curious way, to produce this
result. If a supernatural power could be conceived as planning a scenic
effect, it could hardly have arranged it in a manner more telling, or
more calculated to excite the popular imagination, than has been the
case in the quick succession of the death of Matthew Arnold, of Robert
Browning, and of Tennyson.
_Insatiate archer! could not one suffice?_
_Thy shaft few thrice; and thrice our peace was slain._
A great poet was followed by a greater, and he by the greatest of the
century, and all within five years. So died, but not with this crescent
effect, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Raleigh; so Vanbrugh, Congreve,
Gay, Steele, and Defoe; so Byron, Shelley, and Keats; so Scott,
Coleridge, and Lamb. But in none of these cases was the field left
so exposed as it now is in popular estimation. The deaths of Keats,
Shelley, and Byron were really momentous to an infinitely greater
degree than those of Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson, because the former
were still in the prime of life, while the latter had done their work;
but the general public was not aware of this, and, as is well known,
Shelley and Keats passed away without exciting a ripple of popular
curiosity.
The tone of criticism since the death of Tennyson has been very much
what might, under the circumstances, have been expected. Their efforts
to overwhelm his coffin with lilies and roses have seemed paltry to
the critics, unless they could succeed, at the same time, in laying
waste all the smaller gardens of his neighbours. There is no doubt
that the instinct for suttee lies firmly embedded in human nature, and
that the glory of a dead rajah is dimly felt by us all to be imperfect
unless some one or other is immolated on his funeral pile. But when
we come to think calmly on this matter, it will be seen that this
offering up of the live poets as a burnt sacrifice to the memory of
their dead master is absurd and grotesque. We have boasted all these
years that we possessed the greatest of the world's poets since Victor
Hugo. We did well to boast. But he is taken from us at a great age,
and we complain at once, with bitter cries--because we have no poet
left so venerable or so perfect in ripeness of the long-drawn years of
craftsmanship--that poetry is dead amongst us, and that all the other
excellent artists in verse are worthless scribblers. This is natural,
perhaps, but it is scarcely generous and not a little ridiculous. It
is, moreover, exactly what the critics said in 1850, when Arnold,
Browning, and Tennyson had already published a great deal of their most
admirable work.
The ingratitude of the hour towards the surviving poets of England pays
but a poor compliment to the memory of that great man whose fame it
professes to honour. I suppose that there has scarcely been a writer
of interesting verse who has come into anything like prominence within
the lifetime of Tennyson who has not received from him some letter of
praise--some message of benevolent indulgence. More than fifty years
ago he wrote, in glowing terms, to congratulate Mr. Bailey on his
_Festus_; it is only yesterday that we were hearing of his letters to
Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. William Watson. Tennyson did not affect to
be a critic--no man, indeed, can ever have lived who less _affected_
to be anything--but he loved good verses, and he knew them when he
saw them, and welcomed them indulgently. No one can find it more
distasteful to him to have it asserted that Tennyson was, and will be,
"the last of the English poets" than would Tennyson himself.
It was not my good fortune to see him many times, and only twice, at an
interval of about twelve years, did I have the privilege of hearing him
talk at length and ease. On each of those occasions, however, it was
noticeable with what warmth and confidence he spoke of the future of
English poetry, with what interest he evidently followed its progress,
and how cordially he appreciated what various younger men were doing.
In particular, I hope it is not indiscreet to refer to the tone in
which he spoke to me on each of these occasions of Mr. Swinburne,
whose critical conscience had, it must not be forgotten, led him to
refer with no slight severity to several of the elder poet's writings.
In 1877 Mr. Swinburne's strictures were still recent, and might not
unreasonably have been painfully recollected. Yet Tennyson spoke of
him almost as Dryden did two hundred years ago to Congreve:
_And this I prophesy--thou shalt be seen_
_(Though with some short parenthesis between)_
_High on the throne of wit, and, seated there,_
_Not mine (that's little), but thy laurel wear._
It would never have occurred to this great and wise man that his own
death could be supposed to mark the final burning up and turning to
ashes of the prophetic bays.
These are considerations, however--to return to my original
parable--for the few within the Abbey. They are of no force in guiding
opinion among the non-poetical masses outside. These, dangerously moved
for the nonce to observe the existence of poetry, may make a great
many painful and undesirable reflections before the subject quits
their memory. There is always a peril in a popular movement that is
not founded on genuine feeling, and the excitement about Tennyson's
death has been far too universal to be sincere. It is even now not too
early for us to perceive, if we will face it calmly, that elements of
a much commoner and emptier nature than reverence for a man of genius
have entered into the stir about the Laureate's burial. The multitude
so stirred into an excited curiosity about a great poet will presently
crave, of course, a little more excitement still over another poet,
and this stimulant will not be forthcoming. We have not, and shall not
have for a generation at least, such another sacrifice to offer to the
monster. It will be in the retreat of the wave, in the sense of popular
disappointment at the non-recurrence of such intellectual shocks as the
deaths of Browning and Tennyson have supplied, that the right of poetry
to take precedence among the arts of writing will for the first time
come to be seriously questioned. Our critics will then, too late, begin
to regret their suttee of the Muses; but if they try to redeem their
position by praising this living poet or that, the public will only too
glibly remind them of their own dictum that "poetry died with Tennyson."
In old days the reading public swept the literature of its fathers
into the dust-bin, and read Horace while its immediate contemporaries
were preparing works in prose and verse to suit the taste of the
moment. But nowadays each great writer who passes out of physical life
preserves his intellectual existence intact and becomes a lasting
rival to his surviving successor. The young novelist has no living
competitor so dangerous to him as Dickens and Thackeray are, who are
nevertheless divided from him by time almost as far as Milton was from
Pope. It is nearly seventy years since the earliest of Macaulay's
_Essays_ appeared, and the least reference to one of them would now
be recognised by "every schoolboy." Less than seventy years after
the death of Bacon his _Essays_ were so completely forgotten that
when extracts from them were discovered in the common-place book of
a deceased lady of quality, they were supposed to be her own, were
published and praised by people as clever as Congreve, went through
several editions, and were not detected until within the present
century. When an age made a palimpsest of its memory in this way it was
far easier to content it with contemporary literary excellence than it
is now, when every aspirant is confronted with the quintessence of the
centuries.
It is not, however, from the captious taste of the public that most is
to be feared, but from its indifference. Let it not be believed that,
because a mob of the votaries of Mr. Jerome and Mr. Sims have been
drawn to the precincts of the Abbey to gaze upon a pompous ceremonial,
these admirable citizens have suddenly taken to reading _Lucretius_
or _The Two Voices_. What their praise is worth no one among us would
venture to say in words so unmeasured as those of the dead Master
himself, who, with a prescience of their mortuary attentions, spoke of
these irreverent admirers as those
_Who make it seem more sweet to be_
_The little life of bank and brier,_
_The bird who pipes his lone desire_
_And dies unheard within his tree,_
_Than he that warbles long and loud,_
_And drops at Glory's temple-gates,_
_For whom the carrion-vulture waits_
_To tear his heart before the crowd._
If this is more harsh reproof than a mere idle desire to be excited by
a spectacle or by an event demands, it may nevertheless serve us as
an antidote to the vain illusion that these multitudes are suddenly
converted to a love of fine literature. They are not so converted, and
fine literature--however scandalous it may sound in the ears of this
generation to say it--is for the few.
How long, then, will the many permit themselves to be brow-beaten by
the few? At the present time the oligarchy of taste governs our vast
republic of readers. We tell them to praise the Bishop of Oxford for
his history, and Mr. Walter Pater for his essays, and Mr. Herbert
Spencer for his philosophy, and Mr. George Meredith for his novels.
They obey us, and these are great and illustrious personages about
whom newspaper gossip is continually occupied, whom crowds, when they
have the chance, hurry to gaze at, but whose books (or I am cruelly
misinformed) brave a relatively small circulation. These reputations
are like beautiful churches, into which people turn to cross themselves
with holy water, bow to the altar, and then hurry out again to spend
the rest of the morning in some snug tavern.
Among these churches of living fame, the noblest, the most exquisite
was that sublime cathedral of song which we called Tennyson; and
there, it is true, drawn by fashion and by a choral service of extreme
beauty, the public had formed the habit of congregating. But at length,
after a final ceremony of incomparable dignity, this minster has been
closed. Where will the people who attended there go now? The other
churches stand around, honoured and empty. Will they now be better
filled? Or will some secularist mayor, of strong purpose and an enemy
to sentiment, order them to be deserted altogether? We may, at any
rate, be quite sure that this remarkable phenomenon of the popularity
of Tennyson, however we regard it, is but transitory and accidental,
or at most personal to himself. That it shows any change in the public
attitude of reserved or grumbling respect to the best literature, and
radical dislike to style, will not be seriously advanced.
What I dread, what I long have dreaded, is the eruption of a sort
of Commune in literature. At no period could the danger of such an
outbreak of rebellion against tradition be so great as during the
reaction which must follow the death of our most illustrious writer.
Then, if ever, I should expect to see a determined resistance made to
the pretensions of whatever is rare, or delicate, or abstruse. At no
time, I think, ought those who guide taste amongst us to be more on
their guard to preserve a lofty and yet generous standard, to insist on
the merits of what is beautiful and yet unpopular, and to be unaffected
by commercial tests of distinction. We have lived for ten years in a
fool's paradise. Without suspecting the truth, we have been passing
through a period of poetic glory hardly to be paralleled elsewhere
in our history. One by one great luminaries were removed--Rossetti,
Newman, Arnold, Browning sank, each star burning larger as it neared
the horizon. Still we felt no apprehension, saying, as we turned
towards Farringford:
"_Mais le père est là-bas, dans l'île._"
Now he is gone also, and the shock of his extinction strikes us for the
moment with a sense of positive and universal darkness.
But this very natural impression is a mistaken one. As our eyes grow
accustomed to the absence of this bright particular planet, we shall
be more and more conscious of the illuminating power of the heavenly
bodies that are left. We shall, at least, if criticism directs us
carefully and wholesomely. With all the losses that our literature
has sustained, we are, still, more richly provided with living poets
of distinction than all but the blossoming periods of our history
have been. In this respect we are easily deceived by a glance at some
chart of the course of English literature, where the lines of life of
aged writers overlap those of writers still in their early youth. The
worst pessimist amongst us will not declare that our poetry seems to
be in the utterly and deplorably indigent condition in which the death
of Burns appeared to leave it in 1796. Then the beholder, glancing
round, would see nothing but Crabbe, grown silent for eleven years,
Cowper insane, Blake undeveloped and unrecognised; the pompous, florid
Erasmus Darwin left solitary master of the field. But we, who look at
the chart, see Wordsworth and Coleridge on the point of evolution,
Campbell and Moore at school, Byron and Shelley in the nursery, and
Keats an infant. Who can tell what inheritors of unfulfilled renown may
not now be staining their divine lips with the latest of this season's
blackberries?