THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD
The second period of English poetry in the nineteenth century displays a
variety and abundance of poetical accomplishment which must rank it very
little below either its immediate predecessor, or even the great
so-called Elizabethan era. But it is distinguished from both these
periods, and, indeed, from almost all others by the extraordinary
predominance of a single poet in excellence, in influence, and in
duration. There is probably no other instance anywhere of a poet who for
more than sixty years wrote better poetry than any one of his
contemporaries who were not very old men when he began, and for exactly
fifty of those years was recognised by the best judges as the chief poet
of his country if not of his time.
Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809 at Somersby, in Lincolnshire, where his
father, a member of a good county family, was rector. He was the third
son, and his two elder brothers, Frederick and Charles, both possessed
considerable poetical gifts, though it cannot be said that the _Poems by
Two Brothers_ (it seems that it should really have been "three"), which
appeared in 1826, display much of this or anything whatever of Alfred's
subsequent charm. From the Grammar School of Louth the poet went to
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was contemporary, and in most cases
intimate, with an unusually distinguished set of undergraduates, many of
whom afterwards figured in the famous Sterling Club (see chapter iv). He
also did what not many great future poets have done, he obtained the
Chancellor's prize for English verse with a poem on "Timbuctoo," where
again his special note is almost, though perhaps not quite, absent: it
appears faintly and fitfully in another juvenile poem not formally
published till long afterwards, "The Lover's Tale."
It was in 1830 that he made his first substantive appearance with a book
of _Poems_. This volume was afterwards subjected to a severe handling by
the poet in the way of revision and omission--processes which through
life he continued with such perseverance and rigour, that the final
critical edition of him, when it appears, will be one of the most
complicated of the kind in English literature. So did he also with
another which appeared two years (or a little more) later. It is not
therefore quite just to judge the criticism which these books received,
by the present condition of the poems which figured in them; for though
most of the beauties were there then, they were accompanied by many
defects which are not there now. Criticism, however, was undoubtedly
unfavourable, and even unfair. Although Tennyson was not, either at this
time or at any other, a party politician, the two great Tory
periodicals, the _Quarterly Review_ and _Blackwood's Magazine_, were
still animated, the former by a dislike to the Romantic school in
poetry, the latter by a dislike to "Cockneys"--though how anybody could
have discovered a Cockney in Tennyson may seem marvellous enough.
Accordingly Lockhart in the one and Wilson in the other fell foul
(though in Wilson's case, at least, not indiscriminately) of work which
beyond all question offered very numerous and very convenient handles,
in ways which will be mentioned presently, to merely carping criticism.
Some attempts at reply were made by the poet's friends, notably A. H.
Hallam, but the public did not take to him, and even well-affected and
competent older judges, such as Coleridge, expressed very qualified
admiration.
But during the next decade, in which he gave himself up silently to the
task of perfecting his art, attempting no profession or literary
occupation of profit, and living (partly in London, partly in the
country at High Beach and elsewhere) with extreme simplicity and economy
on his own small means and a pension which was provided for him, the
leaven of an almost fanatical admiration was spreading among readers of
his own age or a little younger. And his next publication, a new issue
of _Poems_ in 1842--containing the final selection and revision of the
others already mentioned, and a large reinforcement of admirable
work--was received, not indeed with the popular avidity which had been
displayed towards Scott and Byron in the generation before, and which
revived in the case of his own later work, but with an immense enjoyment
by almost all true lovers of poetry. Even Wordsworth, the most
ungracious critic of other men's work in his own art of whom the history
of literature gives record, acknowledged Tennyson in the amplest terms.
This was, as has been hinted above, exactly fifty years before his
death, and though in the first of these five decades the pudding if not
the praise was still rather scanty, his reputation waxed steadily and
never waned. To keep for the present to chronicle in biography and
bibliography, he published in 1847 the exquisite "medley" of _The
Princess_, his first attempt at a poem of any length. 1850 was a great
year in his career, for in it he published the collection of elegiacs on
his friend Arthur Hallam, in which some have seen his most perfect work,
and he became Poet Laureate. Three years later he bought a house at
Farringford, near Freshwater in the Isle of Wight, which was for the
rest of his life his occasional and, until 1870 (when to avoid intrusion
he built himself another at Aldworth near Haslemere), his main house.
His poetry now was beginning to bring in some profit, the editions of it
multiplying every year; and during the last thirty years of his life, if
not more, he was probably at least as richly provided with mere gold as
any poet has ever been. He was, however, never seduced into hasty
writing; and he never gave himself to any other occupation save poetry,
while during his entire life he was a hater of what is commonly called
society. In 1855 there appeared _Maud_, the reception of which seemed
at first something of a relapse in welcome, which was in its first form
open to some criticism, and which he touched up to one of the finest as
a whole, as it was in parts one of the most passionate and melodious of
his works. But the _Idylls of the King_, the first and best instalment
of which appeared in 1858, completely revived even his popular vogue,
and made him indeed popular as no poet had been since Byron. It was said
at the time that 17,000 copies of _Enoch Arden_, his next volume (1864),
were sold on the morning of publication.
For the rest of his life his issues were pretty frequent, though the
individual volumes were never large. A series of dramas beginning with
_Queen Mary_ in 1875, and continuing through _Harold_, _The Falcon_,
_The Cup_, the unlucky _Promise of May_, _Becket_, and _The Foresters_,
though fine enough for any other man, could be better spared by his
critical admirers than any other portion of his works. But the volumes
of poems proper, which appeared between 1864 and his death, _Lucretius_,
_Tiresias_, the successive instalments of the _Idylls_, _Locksley Hall
Sixty Years After_, _Demeter_, _The Death of Oenone_, and perhaps
above all the splendid _Ballads_ of 1880, never failed to contain with
matter necessarily of varying excellence things altogether
incomparable--one of the last, the finest and fortunately also the most
popular, being the famous "Crossing the Bar," which appeared in his
penultimate, but last not posthumous, volume in 1889. He died at
Aldworth in October 1892, and was buried with an unequalled solemnity in
Westminster Abbey.
In the case of no English poet is it more important and interesting than
in the case of Tennyson, considering the excellence of his own work in
the first place, and the altogether unparalleled extent of his influence
in the second, to trace the nature and character of his poetical
quality. Nor is this difficult, though strange to say it has not always
been done. In his very earliest work, so soon as this quality appeared
at all, it is to be discovered side by side with other things which are
not native. Undoubtedly the tradition which, in the general filiation
of English poetry, connects Tennyson with Keats, is not wholly wrong.
In many of the weaker things, and not a few of the better, of the
volumes of 1830 and 1832, there is to be seen both the wonderful music
which Keats attained by a combination of the classical and romantic
appeals--the appeals which in his own case are singly exhibited at their
best in the "Grecian Urn" and in "La Belle Dame sans Merci,"--and the
sometimes faulty and illegitimate means which Keats took to produce this
effect. But to any one who compares rationally (and it may be permitted
to remark parenthetically, that nothing seems to be more misunderstood
than the comparative point of view) the difference between Keats and
Tennyson will emerge at once. Both being great poets, there is the
inexplicable in both; while as Keats undoubtedly died before he had any
chance of applying to his own powers and products the unequalled process
of clarifying and self-criticism which went on with Tennyson in the ten
years' silence between the second of the volumes just mentioned and his
issue of 1842, it is impossible to say that Keats himself could not have
done something similar. Nothing that he ever did is worse in point of
"gush," of undisciplined fluency, of mistakes in point of taste and of
other defects than the notorious piece about "the darling little room,"
on which the future Poet Laureate's critics were so justly severe; while
in the single point of passion it is very doubtful whether Tennyson ever
approached the author of "La Belle Dame sans Merci." There was not
perhaps much to choose between the two in their natural power of
associating pictorial with musical expression; while both had that gift
of simple humanity, of plain honest healthy understanding of common
things, the absence of which gives to Shelley--in some ways a greater
poet than either of them--a certain unearthliness and unreality.
But Tennyson had from the first a wider range of interest and capacity
than Keats, and he had the enormous advantage of thorough and regular
literary training. No poet ever improved his own work as Tennyson did;
nor has any, while never allowing his genius to be daunted by
self-comparison with his predecessors, had such a faculty of availing
himself of what they had done without copying, of seeing what they had
not done and supplying the gap himself. And besides this he had the
inexplicable, the incommunicable, the unique, the personal gift. In the
very earliest things, in "Claribel," in "Mariana," in the "Recollections
of the Arabian Nights," in the "Ode to Memory," in the "Dirge," in the
"Dying Swan," in "Oriana," there is even to those who were born long
after they were written, even to those who have for years sedulously
compared them with almost all things before and with all things since,
the unmistakable note of the new, of the new that never can be old. It
is there in the rhythms, it is there in the phrase. The poet may take
things that had previously existed--the Keatsian and Shelleian lyric,
the Wordsworthian attitude to Nature, the Miltonic blank verse; but
inevitably, invariably, each under his hands becomes different, becomes
individual and original. The result cannot be accounted for by
mannerisms, from which at no time was Tennyson free, and after the
thousands and ten thousands of imitations which have been seen since, it
stands out untouched, unrivalled.
In the next instalment this quality of intense poetical individuality
strengthened and deepened. As we read "The Two Voices," "Oenone," "The
Palace of Art," "The Lotos Eaters," "A Dream of Fair Women," it becomes
almost incomprehensible how any one who ever read them even in forms
less perfect than those that we possess, should have mistaken their
incomparable excellence. But the student of literary history knows
better. He knows that nearly always the poet has to create his audience,
that he sings before the dawn of the day in which he is to be sovereign.
And then with the 1842 book came practically the completion of Tennyson
in the sense of the indication of his powers. Edward FitzGerald, as is
elsewhere noticed, thought, or at least said, that everything his friend
had done after this was more or less a declension. This is a common and
not an ignoble Fallacy of Companionship--the delusion of those who have
hailed and accompanied a poet or a prophet in his early struggles. It
is not even wholly a fallacy, inasmuch as, in the case of the class of
poets to which Tennyson belongs, there does come a time when the rest of
the products of their genius is so to speak _applied_: it ceases to
reveal them in new aspects. They do not repeat themselves; but they
chiefly vary. Now came the magnificent "Morte D'Arthur" (the "Idylls of
the King" in microcosm, with all their merits and none of their
defects), "St. Simeon Stylites," "Ulysses," "Locksley Hall," "St. Agnes'
Eve," and other exquisite things; while to this period, as the
subsequent arrangement shows, belong not a few, such as "Tithonus" and
"The Voyage," which were not actually published till later, and in which
keen observers at the time of their publication detected as it were an
older ring, a more genuine and unblended vintage.
It is not improper therefore to break off here for a moment and to
endeavour to state--leaving out the graces that can never be stated, and
are more important than all the others--the points in which this new
excellence of Tennyson differed from the excellences of his forerunners.
One of them, not the least important, but the least truly original,
because something distantly resembling it had been seen before in Keats
and Shelley, is the combined application of pictorial and musical
handling. Not, of course, that all poets had not endeavoured to depict
their subjects vividly and to arrange the picture in a melodious frame
of sound, not that the best of them had not also endeavoured to convey,
if it were possible, the colours into the sense, the sense into the
music. But partly as a result of the natural development and acquired
practice of the language, partly for the very reason that the arts both
of painting and music had themselves made independent progress, most of
all, perhaps, because Tennyson was the first poet in English of the very
greatest genius who dared not to attempt work on the great scale, but
put into short pieces (admitting, of course, of infinite formal variety)
what most of his forerunners would have spun into long poems--the result
here is, as a rule, far in advance of those forerunners in this
respect, and as an exception on a level with the very best of their
exceptions. With Shakespeare there is no comparison; Shakespeare can
send to every poet an "O of Giotto" in his own style to which that poet
must bow. But of others only Spenser had hitherto drawn such pictures as
those of the "Palace" and the "Dream," and Spenser had done them in far
less terse fashion than Tennyson. Only Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Blake,
perhaps Beddoes, and a few Elizabethans had poured into the veins of
language the ineffable musical throb of a score of pieces from
"Claribel" to "Break! Break!" and not one of them had done it in quite
the same way. Only Milton, with Thomson as a far distant second, had
impressed upon non-dramatic blank verse such a swell and surge as that
of "Oenone." And about all these different kinds and others there
clung and rang a peculiar dreamy slow music which was heard for the
first time, and which has never been reproduced,--a music which in "The
Lotos Eaters," impossible as it might have seemed, adds a new charm
after the _Faerie Queen_, after the _Castle of Indolence_, after the
_Revolt of Islam_ to the Spenserian stanza, which makes the stately
verses of the "Palace" and the "Dream" tremble and cry with melodious
emotion, and which accomplishes the miracle of the poet's own dying swan
in a hundred other poems all "flooded over with eddying song."
But there is something more to be noted still. The poet had caught and
was utilising the spirit of his time in two ways, one of them almost
entirely new. That he constantly sang the subjective view of nature may
be set down to the fact that he came after Wordsworth, though the fact
that he sang it without the Wordsworthian dryness and dulness must be
set down to his own credit. But in that sense of the history of former
times which is perhaps the chief glory of the nineteenth century in
matters of thought he had been anticipated by no one. He might not have
attained it without Scott and Byron, but his expression of it was hardly
conditioned in the very slightest degree by the expression either of
Byron or of Scott. They were not in strictness men of the nineteenth
century; he was, and he represented the very best features of his time
in attending, from its point of view mainly, to the features of better
times.
But if FitzGerald's dictum were taken in the sense that Tennyson's
poetical career might, with advantage or with anything but the greatest
possible loss, have been closed in 1842, then certainly it would be
something more than a crotchet. Nothing perhaps appeared subsequently
(with unimportant exceptions such as the plays, and as the dialect
pieces of which the "Northern Farmer" was the first and best) the
possibility of which could not have been divined from the earlier work.
The tree had blossomed; it had almost, to keep up the metaphor, set; but
by far the greater part of the fruit was yet to ripen, and very much of
it was to be of quality not inferior, of quantity far greater, than
anything that had yet been given.
_The Princess_ and _In Memoriam_, the two first-fruits of this later
crop, were certainly not the least important. Indeed they may be said to
have shown for the first time that the poet was capable of producing, in
lighter and severer styles respectively, work not limited to short
flights and exemplifying what (perhaps mistakenly) is called "thought,"
as well as style and feeling, colour and music. _The Princess_ is
undoubtedly Tennyson's greatest effort, if not exactly in comedy, in a
vein verging towards the comic--a side on which he was not so well
equipped for offence or for defence as on the other. But it is a
masterpiece. Exquisite as its author's verse always is, it was never
more exquisite than here, whether in blank verse or in the (superadded)
lyrics, while none of his deliberately arranged plays contains
characters half so good as those of the Princess herself, of Lady
Blanche and Lady Psyche, of Cyril, of the two Kings, and even of one or
two others. And that unequalled dream-faculty of his, which has been
more than once glanced at, enabled him to carry off whatever was
fantastical in the conception with almost unparalleled felicity. It may
or may not be agreed that the question of the equality of the sexes is
one of the distinguishing questions of this century; and some of those
who would give it that position may or may not maintain, if they think
it worth while, that it is treated here too lightly, while their
opponents may wish that it had been treated more lightly still. But this
very difference will point the unbiassed critic to the same conclusion,
that Tennyson has hit the golden mean; while that, whatever he has hit
or missed in subject, the verse of his essay is golden, no one who is
competent will doubt. Such lyrics as "The splendour falls" and "Tears,
idle tears," such blank verse as that of the closing passage, would
raise to the topmost heights of poetry whatever subject it was spent
upon.
_In Memoriam_ attacked two subjects in the main,--the one perennial, the
other of the time,--just as _The Princess_ had done. The perennial,
which is often but another, if not an exclusive, word for the poetical,
was in the first case aspirant and happy love, in the other mourning
friendship. The ephemeral was, in the latter, the sort of half doubting
religiosity which has occupied so much of the thought of our day. On
this latter point, as on the other just mentioned and on most beside,
the attitude of Tennyson was "Liberal-Conservatism" (if political slang
may be generalised), inclining always to the Conservative rather than to
the Liberal side, but giving Liberalism a sufficient footing and
hearing. Here again opinions may be divided; and here again those who
think that in poetry the mere fancies of the moment are nothing may be
disposed to pay little attention to the particular fancies which have
occupied the poet. But here again the manner, as always with real poets,
carries off, dissolves, annihilates the special matter for poetical
readers. Tennyson had here taken (not invented) a remarkable and not
frequently used stanza, the iambic dimeter quatrain with the rhymes not
alternated, but arranged _a b b a_. It is probable that if a
well-instructed critic had been asked beforehand what would be the
effect of this employed with a certain monotone of temper and subject in
a book of some three thousand lines or so, he would have shaken his head
and hinted that the substantive would probably justify its adjective
and the monotone become monotonous. And if he had been really a deacon
in his craft he would have added: "But to a poet there is nothing
impossible." The difficulty was no impossibility to Tennyson. He has not
only, in the rather more than six score poems of this wonderful book,
adjusted his medium to a wide range of subjects, all themselves adjusted
to the general theme, but he has achieved that poetic miracle, the
communication to the same metre and to no very different scheme of
phrase of an infinite variety of interior movement. There is scarcely a
bad line in _In Memoriam_; there are few lines that do not contain a
noble thought, a passionate sentiment, a beautiful picture; but there is
nothing greater about it than the way in which, side by side with the
prevailing undertone of the stanza, the individual pieces vary the music
and accompany it, so to speak, in duet with a particular melody. It must
have been already obvious to good ears that no greater master of English
harmonics--perhaps that none so great--had ever lived; but _In Memoriam_
set the fact finally and irrevocably on record.
_Maud_ was the third, and perhaps it may be said to have been, on a
great scale, the last experiment in thus combining the temporal with the
eternal. It was also probably the weakest as a whole, though the poet
had never done more poetical things than the passage beginning, "Cold
and clear-cut face"; than the prothalamium, never to have its due
sequel, "I have led her home"; than the incomparable and
never-to-be-hackneyed "Come into the garden"; or than the best of all,
"Oh! that 'twere possible." It may even be contended that if it were
ever allowable to put the finger down and say, "Here is the highest,"
these, and not the best things of the 1842 volumes, are the absolute
summit of the poet's effort, the point which, though he was often near
it, he never again quite reached. But the piece, as a whole, is
certainly less of a success, less smooth and finished as it comes from
its own lathe, than either _The Princess_ or _In Memoriam_. It looks too
like an essay in competition with the "Spasmodic School" of its own day;
it drags in merely casual things--adulteration, popular politics, and
ephemera of all kinds--too assiduously, and its characterisations are
not happy. There is a tradition that the poet met a critic, and a very
accomplished critic too, who was one of his own oldest friends, and
said, "What do you mean by calling _Maud_ vulgar?" "I didn't," said the
critic, quite truly. "No, but you meant it," growled Tennyson. And there
was something of a confession in the growl.
But these slight relapses (and, after all, what sort of a relapse is it
which gives us not merely the incomparable things referred to, but
others hardly less exquisite?) never, in the great writers, serve as
anything but retreats before an advance; and certainly, in a sense, the
_Idylls of the King_ were an advance, though not, perhaps, in all
senses. No total so brilliant, so varied within a certain general unity,
so perfectly polished in style, so cunningly adjusted to meet the
popular without disappointing the critical ear, had ever come from
Tennyson's pen as the first quartet of Idylls, _Enid_, _Vivien_,
_Elaine_, and _Guinevere_. No such book of English blank verse, with the
doubtful exception of the _Seasons_, had been seen since Milton. Nothing
more adroitly selected than the contrast of the four special pieces--a
contrast lost to those who only read them in the completed
Arthuriad--has been often attempted or ever achieved. It is true that
the inner faithful, the sacred band of Tennysonians, old and young,
grumbled a little that polish had been almost too much attended to; that
there was a certain hardish mannerism, glittering but cold, about the
style; that there was noticeable a certain compromise in the appeal, a
certain trimming of the sail to the popular breeze. These criticisms
were not entirely without foundation, and they were more justified than
their authors could know by the later instalments of the poem, which,
the latest not published till twenty-seven years afterwards, rounded it
off to its present bulk of twelve books, fifteen separate pieces, and
over ten thousand lines. Another, more pedantic in appearance, but not
entirely destitute of weight, was that which urged that in handling the
Arthurian story the author had, so to speak, "bastardised it," and had
given neither mediaeval nor modern sentiment or colouring, but a sort of
amalgamation of both. Yet the charm of the thing was so great, and the
separate passages were so consummate, that even critics were loth to
quarrel with such a gift.
The later instalments of the poem--some of them, as has been said, very
much later, but still so closely connected as to be best noticed
here--were of somewhat less even excellence. It was an inevitable, but
certainly an unfortunate thing, that the poet republished the
magnificent early fragment above noticed in a setting which, fine as it
would have been for any one else, was inferior to this work of the very
best time. Some of the lighter passages, as in _Gareth and Lynette_,
showed less grace than their forerunners in _The Princess_; and in
_Pelleas and Ettarre_ and _Balin and Balan_ the poet sometimes seemed to
be attempting alien moods which younger poets than himself had made
their own. But the best passages of some of these later Idylls, notably
those of _The Holy Grail_ and _The Last Tournament_, were among the
finest, not merely of the book, but of the poet. Nowhere has he caught
the real, the best, spirit of the legends he followed more happily;
nowhere has he written more magnificent verse than in Percivale's
account of his constantly baffled quest and of Lancelot's visit to the
"enchanted towers of Carbonek."
Far earlier than these, _Enoch Arden_ and its companion poems were
something more of a return to the scheme of the earlier books--no very
long single composition, but a medley of blank verse pieces and lyrics,
the former partly expansions of the scheme of the earlier "English
Idyll," the latter various and generally beautiful; one or two, such as
"In the Valley of Cauterets," of the most beautiful. Here, too, were
some interesting translations, with the dialect pieces above referred
to; and all the later volumes, except those containing the plays,
preserved this mixed manner. Their contents are too numerous for many to
be mentioned here. Only in the _Ballads and Other Poems_ was something
like a distinctly new note struck in the two splendid patriotic pieces
on "The Last Fight of the _Revenge_" and the "Defence of Lucknow,"
which, even more than the poet's earlier "Charge of the Light Brigade,"
deserve the title of the best English war-songs since Campbell; in
"Rizpah," an idyll of a sterner and more tragic kind than anything he
had previously attempted; and in the "Voyage of Maeldune," this last in
some respects the most interesting of the whole. For the marvellous
power which great poets possess of melting, of "founding," so to speak,
minor styles and kinds of poetry to their own image, while not losing a
certain character of the original, has never been shown better than
here. Attention had, even before the date of this poem, been drawn to
the peculiar character of early Celtic poetry,---not the adulterated
style of Ossian, but the genuine method of the old Irish singers. And,
since, a whole band of young and very clever writers have set
themselves, with a mixture of political and poetical enthusiasm, the
task of reviving these notes if possible. They have rarely succeeded in
getting very close to them without mere archaic pastiche. Tennyson in
this poem carried away the whole genius of the Celtic legend, infused it
into his own verse, branded it with his own seal, and yet left the
character of the vintage as unmistakable as if he had been an Irishman
of the tenth century, instead of an Englishman of the nineteenth. And
indeed there are no times, or countries, or languages in the kingdom of
poetry.
A very little more may, perhaps, still be said about this great
poet,--great in the character and variety of his accomplishment, in the
volume of it, and, above all, in the extraordinarily sustained quality
of his genius and the length of time during which it dominated and
pervaded the literature of his country. The influences of Pope and
Dryden were weak in force and merely external in effect, the influence
of Byron was short-lived, that of Wordsworth was partial and limited, in
comparison with the influence of Tennyson. Of this, as of a mere
historical fact, there can be no dispute among those who care to inform
themselves of the facts and to consider them coolly. Of his intrinsic
merit, as opposed to his influential importance, it is not of course
possible to speak so peremptorily. Among the great volume of more or
less unfavourable criticism which such a career was sure to call forth,
two notes perhaps were the most dominant, the most constant, and (even
fervent admirers may admit) the least unjust. He was accused of a
somewhat excessive prettiness, a sort of dandyism and coquetry in form,
and of a certain want of profundity in matter. The last charge is the
more unprofitable in discussion, for it turns mainly on vast and vague
questions of previous definition. "What is thought?" "What is
profundity?" a by no means jesting demurrer may object, and he will not
soon be cleared out of the way. And it will perhaps seem to some that
what is called Tennyson's lack of profundity consists only in a
disinclination on his part to indulge in what the Germans call the
_Schwaetzerei_, the endless, aimless talkee-talkee about "thoughtful"
things in which the nineteenth century has indulged beyond the record of
any since what used to be called the Dark Ages. On the real "great
questions" Tennyson was not loth to speak, and spoke gravely enough;
even to the ephemeralities, as we have said, he paid rather too much
than too little attention. But he did not go into the ins and outs of
them as some of his contemporaries did, and as other contemporaries
thought fitting. He usually neglected the negligible; and perhaps it
would not hurt him with posterity if he had neglected it a little more,
though it hurt him a little with contemporaries that he neglected it as
much as he did.
The charge of prettiness is to be less completely ruled out; though it
shows even greater mistake in those who do more than touch very lightly
on it. In the earliest forms of the earlier poems not seldom, and
occasionally in even the latest forms of the later, the exquisiteness of
the poet's touch in music and in painting, in fancy and in form, did
sometimes pass into something like finicalness, into what is called in
another language _mignardise_. But this was only the necessary, and,
after he was out of his apprenticeship, the minimised effect of his
great poetical quality--that very quality of exquisiteness in form, in
fancy, in painting, and in music which has just been stated. We have, it
must be admitted, had greater poets than Tennyson. Shakespeare,
Spenser, Milton, Shelley, undoubtedly deserve this preference to him;
Wordsworth and Keats may deserve it. But we have had none so uniformly,
and over such a large mass of work, exquisite. In the lighter fantastic
veins he may sometimes be a little unsure in touch and taste; in satire
and argument a little heavy, a little empty, a little rhetorical; in
domestic and ethical subjects a little tame. But his handlings of these
things form a very small part of his work. And in the rest none of all
these faults appears, and their absence is due to the fact that nothing
interferes with the exquisite perfection of the form. Some faults have
been found with Tennyson's rhymes, though this is generally
hypercriticism; and in his later years he was a little too apt to
accumulate tribrachs in his blank verse, a result of a mistaken sense of
the true fact that he was better at slow rhythms than at quick, and of
an attempt to cheat nature. But in all other respects his versification
is by far the most perfect of any English poet, and results in a harmony
positively incomparable. So also his colour and outline in conveying the
visual image are based on a study of natural fact and a practice in
transferring it to words which are equally beyond comparison. Take any
one of a myriad of lines of Tennyson, and the mere arrangement of vowels
and consonants will be a delight to the ear; let any one of a thousand
of his descriptions body itself before the eye, and the picture will be
like the things seen in a dream, but firmer and clearer.
Although, as has been said, the popularity of Lord Tennyson itself was
not a plant of very rapid growth, and though but a short time before his
position was undisputed it was admitted only by a minority, imposing in
quality but far from strong in mere numbers, his chief rival during the
latter part of their joint lives was vastly slower in gaining the public
ear. It is not quite pleasant to think that the well-merited but
comparatively accidental distinction of the Laureateship perhaps did
more even for Tennyson in this respect than the intrinsic value of his
work. Robert Browning had no such aid, his verse was even more
abhorrent than Tennyson's to the tradition of the elders, and until he
found a sort of back-way to please, he was even more indifferent to
pleasing. So that while Tennyson became in a manner popular soon after
1850, two decades more had to pass before anything that could be called
popularity came to Browning. It is, though the actual dates are well
enough known to most people, still something of a surprise to remember
that at that time he had been writing for very nearly forty years, and
that his first book, though a little later than Tennyson's, actually
appeared before the death of Coleridge and not more than a few months
after that of Scott. Browning, about whose ancestry and parentage a good
deal of mostly superfluous ink has been shed, was born, the son of a
city man, on 7th May 1812, in the, according to the elder Mr. Weller,
exceptional district of Camberwell. He was himself exceptional enough in
more ways than one. His parents had means; but Browning did not receive
the ordinary education of a well-to-do Englishman at school and college,
and his learning, though sufficiently various, was privately obtained.
_Pauline_, his first poem, appeared in 1833, but had been written about
two years earlier. He did not reprint it in the first general collection
of his verse, nor till after his popularity had been established; and it
cannot be said to be of great intrinsic excellence. But it was
distinctly characteristic:--first, in a strongly dramatic tone and
strain without regular dramatic form; secondly, in a peculiar fluency of
decasyllabic verse that could not be directly traced to any model; and,
thirdly, in a certain quality of thought, which in later days for a long
time received, and never entirely lost from the vulgar, the name of
"obscurity," but which perhaps might be more justly termed
breathlessness--the expression, if not the conception, of a man who
either did not stop at all to pick his words, or was only careful to
pick them out of the first choice that presented itself to him of
something not commonplace.
In _Pauline_, however, there is little positive beauty. In the next
book, _Paracelsus_ (1835), there is a great deal. Here the dramatic form
was much more definite, though still not attempting acted or actable
drama. The poet's appetite for "soul-dissection" was amply shown in the
characters not merely of Paracelsus himself, but of his soberer friends
Festus and Michal, and of the Italian poet Aprile, a sort of Euphorion
pretty evidently suggested by, though greatly enlarged from, the actual
Euphorion of the second part of _Faust_, then not long finished. The
rapid, breathless blank verse, the crowding rush of simile and
illustration, and the positive plethora of meaning, more often glanced
and hinted at than fully worked out, were as noteworthy as before in
kind, and as much more so in degree as in scale. Here too were lyrics,
not anticipating the full splendour of the poet's later lyrical verse,
but again quite original. Here, in fact, to anybody who chose to pay
attention, was a real "new poet" pretty plainly announced.
Very few did choose to pay attention; and Browning's next attempt was
not of a kind to conciliate halting or hostile opinion, though it might
please the initiated. He wrote for his friend Macready a play intended
at least to be of the regular acting kind. This play, _Strafford_
(1837), contains fine things; but the involution and unexpectedness of
the poet's thought now and always showed themselves least engagingly
when they were even imagined as being spoken not read. After yet another
three years _Sordello_ followed, and here the most peculiar but the
least estimable side of the author's genius attained a prominence not
elsewhere equalled, till in his latest stage he began to parody himself,
and scarcely even then. Although this book does not deserve the
disgusted contempt which used to be poured on it, though it contains
many noble passages, and as the "story of a soul" is perfectly
intelligible to moderate intellects, it must have occasioned some doubts
and qualms to intelligent admirers of the poet as to whether he would
lose himself in the paths on which he was entering. Such doubts must
have been soon set at rest by the curious medley issued in parts, under
the general title of _Bells and Pomegranates_, between 1841 and 1846.
The plays here, though often striking and showing that the author's
disabilities, though never likely to leave, were also not likely to
master him, showed also, with the possible exception of the charming
nondescript of _Pippa Passes_, no new or positively unexpected faculty.
But certain shorter things, lyrical and other, at last made it clear
that Browning could sing as well as say: and from this time, 1846 (which
also was the year of his marriage with Miss Elizabeth Barrett), he could
claim rank as a great poet. He had been hitherto more or less a
wanderer, but with headquarters in England; he now went to Florence,
which in turn was his headquarters till his wife's death in 1861. His
publications during the time were only two--_Christmas Eve and Easter
Day_ in 1850, and _Men and Women_ in 1855. But these were both
masterpieces. He never did better work, and, with _Bells and
Pomegranates_ and _Dramatis Personae_, which appeared in 1864 (when,
after Mrs. Browning's death, he had returned to London), they perhaps
contain all his very best work.
Up to this time, the thirty-first year from the publication of
_Pauline_, Browning's work, though by no means scanty, could hardly be
called voluminous as the result of half a lifetime of absolute leisure.
A little before _Dramatis Personae_--itself not a long book, though of
hardly surpassed quality--the whole of the poems except _Pauline_ had
been gathered into three small but thick volumes, which undoubtedly did
very much to spread the poet's fame--a spread much helped by their
immediate successors. The enormous poem of _The Ring and the Book_,
originally issued in four volumes and containing more than twenty
thousand verses, was published in 1869, and, the public being by this
time well prepared for it, received a welcome not below its merits.
Having at last gained the public ear, Mr. Browning did not fail to
improve the occasion, and of the next fifteen years few passed without a
volume, while some saw two, from his pen. These, including translations
of the _Alcestis_ and the _Agamemnon_ (for the poet was at this time
seized with a great fancy for Greek, which he rendered with much fluency
and a very singular indulgence in a sort of hybrid and pedantic spelling
of proper names), were _Balaustion's Adventure_ and _Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ (1871), _Fifine at the Fair_ (1872), _Red Cotton
Night-Cap Country_ (1873), _Aristophanes' Apology_ and _The Inn Album_
(1875), _Pacchiarotto and how he Worked in Distemper_ (1876), _La
Saisiaz_ (1878), _Dramatic Idylls_, two volumes (1879-80), _Jocoseria_
(1883), and _Ferishtah's Fancies_ (1884). The five remaining years of
Browning's long life were somewhat less fruitful; but _Parleyings with
Certain People of Importance_ came in 1887, and at the end of 1889,
almost simultaneously with his death in Italy, _Asolando_, which some
think by far his best volume since _Dramatis Personae_, a quarter of a
century older. These volumes occasionally contained a few, and
_Asolando_ contained several, of the lovely lyrics above referred to.
But the great bulk of them consisted of the curious blank verse, now
narrative, now ostensibly dramatic monologue, which the poet had always
affected, and which he now seemed to affect more and more. In them, too,
from _The Ring and the Book_ onwards, there appeared a tendency stronger
than ever to an eccentric and almost burlesque phraseology, which at one
time threatened to drown all his good qualities, as involution of
thought had threatened to drown them in the _Sordello_ period. But this
danger also was averted at the last.
Critical estimate of Browning's poetry was for years hampered by, and
cannot even yet be said to have been quite cleared from, the violent
prepossessions of public opinion respecting him. For more than a
generation, in the ordinary sense, he was more or less passionately
admired by a few devotees, stupidly or blindly ignored by the public in
general, and persistently sneered at, lectured, or simply disliked by
the majority of academically educated critics. The sharp revulsion of
his later years has been noticed; and it amounted almost to this, that
while dislike to him in those who had intelligently, if somewhat
narrowly, disapproved of his ways was not much affected, a Browning
_cultus_, almost as blind as the former pooh-poohing or ignoring, set
in, and extended from a considerable circle of ardent worshippers to the
public at large. A "Browning Society" was founded in 1881, and received
from the poet a kind of countenance which would certainly not have been
extended to it by most English men of letters. During his later years
handbooks solemnly addressed to neophytes in Browningism, as if the cult
were a formal science or art, appeared with some frequency; and there
has been even a bulky _Browning Dictionary_, which not only expounds the
more recondite (and, it is fair to say, tolerably frequent) allusions of
the master, but provides for his disciples something to make up for the
ordinary classical and other dictionaries with which, it seemed to be
presumed, their previous education would have made them little
conversant.
This not very wise adulation in its turn not unnaturally excited a sort
of irritation and dislike, to a certain extent renewing the old
prejudice in a new form. To those who could discard extraneous
considerations and take Browning simply as he was, he must, from a
period which only very old men can now remember, have always appeared a
very great, though also a very far from perfect poet. His imperfections
were always on the surface, though perhaps they were not always confined
to it; and only uncritical partisanship could at any time have denied
them, while some of them became noticeably worse in the period of rapid
composition or publication from 1870 to 1885. A large license of
unconventionality, and even of defiance of convention, may be claimed
by, and should be allowed to, persons of genius such as Mr. Browning
undoubtedly possessed. But it can hardly be denied that he, like his
older contemporary Carlyle, whose example may not have been without
influence upon him, did set at naught not merely the traditions, but the
sound norms and rules of English phrase to a rather unnecessary extent.
A beginning of deliberate provocation and challenge, passing into an
after-period of more or less involuntary persistence in an exaggeration
of the mannerisms at first more or less deliberately adopted, is apt to
be shown by persons who set themselves in this way to innovate; and it
was shown by Mr. Browning. It is impossible for any intelligent admirer
to maintain, except as a paradox, that his strange modulations, his
cacophonies of rhythm and rhyme, his occasional adoption of the
foreshortened language of the telegraph or the comic stage, and many
other peculiarities of his, were not things which a more perfect art
would have either absorbed and transformed, or at least have indulged in
with far less luxuriance. Nor does it seem much more reasonable for
anybody to contend that his fashion of soul-dissection at a hand-gallop,
in drama, in monologue, in lay sermon, was not largely, even grossly,
abused. Sometimes the thing was not worth doing at all--there are at
least half a dozen of the books between _The Ring and the Book_ and
_Asolando_ from the whole of which a judicious lover of poetry would not
care to save more than the bulk of the smallest of them should they be
menaced with entire destruction. Even in the best of these what is good
could generally, if not always, have been put at the length of the
shorter _Men and Women_ with no loss, nay, with great advantage. The
obscurity so much talked of was to some extent from the very first, and
to the last continued to be, in varying degrees, an excuse, or at least
an occasion, for putting at great length thought that was not always so
far from commonplace as it looked into expression which was very often
not so much original as unkempt. "Less matter with more art" was the
demand which might have been made of Mr. Browning from first to last,
and with increasing instance as he became more popular.
But though no competent lover of poetry can ever have denied the truth
and cogency of these objections, the admission of them can never, in any
competent lover of poetry, have obscured or prevented an admiration of
Browning none the less intense because not wholly unreserved. Even his
longer poems, in which his faults were most apparent, possessed an
individuality of the first order, combined the intellectual with no
small part of the sensual attraction of poetry after a fashion not
otherwise paralleled in England since Dryden, and provided an
extraordinary body of poetical exercise and amusement. The pathos, the
power, at times the humour, of the singular soul-studies which he was so
fond of projecting with little accessory of background upon his canvas,
could not be denied, and have not often been excelled. If he was not
exactly what is commonly called orthodox in religion, and if his
philosophy was of a distinctly vague order, he was always "on the side
of the angels" in theology, in metaphysics, in ethics; and his politics,
if exceedingly indistinct and unpractical, were always noble and
generous. Further, though he seems to have been utterly destitute of the
slightest gift of dramatic construction, he had no mean share of a much
rarer gift, that of dramatic character; and in a century of descriptions
of nature his, if not the most exquisite, have a freedom and truth, a
largeness of outline combined with felicity of colour, not elsewhere to
be discovered.
But it is as a lyric poet that Browning ranks highest; and in this
highest class it is impossible to refuse him all but the highest rank,
in some few cases the very highest. He understood love pretty
thoroughly; and when a lyric poet understands love thoroughly there is
little doubt of his position. But he understood many other things as
well, and could give strange and delightful voice to them. Even his
lyrics, still more his short non-lyrical poems, admirable as they often
are, and closely as they group with the lyrics proper, are not untouched
by his inseparable defect. He cannot be prevented from inserting now and
then in the midst of exquisite passages more or fewer of his quirks and
cranks of thought and phrase, of his vernacularity or his euphuism, of
his outrageous rhymes (which, however, are seldom or never absolutely
bad), of those fantastic tricks of his in general which remind one of
nothing so much as of dashing a bladder with rattling peas in the
reader's face just at the height of the passion or the argument.
Yet the beauty, the charm, the variety, the vigour of these short poems
are as wonderful as the number of them. He never lost the secret of them
to his latest years. The delicious lines "Never the time and the place,
And the loved one all together" are late; and there are half a dozen
pieces in _Asolando_, latest of all, which exhibit to the full the
almost bewildering beauty of combined sound, thought, and sight, the
clash of castanets and the thrill of flutes, the glow of flower and
sunset, the subtle appeal for sympathy in feeling or assent in judgment.
The song snatches in _Pippa Passes_, "Through the Metidja," "The Lost
Leader," "In a Gondola," "Earth's Immortalities," "Mesmerism," "Women
and Roses," "Love Among the Ruins," "A Toccata of Galuppis," "Prospice,"
"Rabbi Ben Ezra," "Porphyria's Lover," "After," with scores of others,
and the "Last Ride Together," the poet's most perfect thing, at the head
of the list, are such poems as a very few--Shakespeare, Shelley, Burns,
Coleridge--may surpass now and then in pure lyrical perfection, as
Tennyson may excel in dreamy ecstasy, as some seventeenth century
songsters may outgo in quaint and perfect fineness of touch, but such as
are nowhere to be surpassed or equalled for a certain volume and variety
of appeal, for fulness of life and thought, of action and passion.
Mr. Browning's wife, Elizabeth Barrett, was older than himself by six
years, and her period of popularity considerably anticipated his. But
except one very juvenile book she published nothing of importance till
1838, when Browning, whom she did not then know, had already manifested
his idiosyncrasy. Miss Barrett, whose father's original name was
Moulton, was born at Carlton Hall, Durham, on 6th March 1806. The change
of name was brought on by succession to estates in the West Indies; and
the family were wealthy. For the greater part of Miss Barrett's youth
they lived in Herefordshire at a place, Hope End, which has left great
traces on her early poetry; later her headquarters were in London, with
long excursions to Devonshire. These excursions were mainly caused by
bad health, from which, as well as from family bereavements, Miss
Barrett was a great sufferer. She had read widely; she began to write as
a mere child; and her studies extended even to Greek, though in a rather
amateurish and desultory fashion. Her _Essay on Mind_ and other poems
appeared in 1825; but a considerable interval, as noted above, elapsed
before, in _The Seraphim_ and other poems, she gave, if not a truer, a
more characteristic note. And two more intervals of exactly the same
length gave _Poems_ 1846 and _Poems_ 1850, containing most of her best
work. Meanwhile she had met Robert Browning, and had married him, rather
against the wish of her family, in 1846. The rest of her life was spent
mostly at Florence, where, in 1849, the only child of the marriage was
born. Two years later appeared _Casa Guidi Windows_ and the long
"sociological" romance of Aurora Leigh. In these, and still more in the
_Poems before Congress_ (1860), a not unnatural tendency to echo the
peculiar form and spirit of her husband's work is observable, not by any
means always or frequently to advantage. She died at Florence on 30th
June 1861, and next year a volume of _Last Poems_ was issued. The most
interesting document in regard to her since has been her Letters to R.
H. Horne, the author of _Orion_, which were published in 1876.
It has been said that Mrs. Browning's popularity long anticipated her
husband's; indeed, years after her death, and on the very eve of the
publication of _The Ring and the Book_, it was possible to meet persons,
not uncultivated, who were fairly well acquainted with her verse and
entirely ignorant of his. The case has since been altered; but it is
believed that Mrs. Browning still retains, and it is probable that she
will always retain, no small measure of general favour. It has been
usual to speak of her as the chief English poetess, which she certainly
is if bulk and character of work as distinguished from perfection of
workmanship are considered. Otherwise, she must as certainly give place
to Miss Christina Rossetti. But Mrs. Browning no doubt combined, in very
unusual and interesting manner, the qualities which appeal to what may
be called, with no disdainful intention, the crowd of readers of poetry,
and those which appeal to the elect. Even the peculiarities which lent
themselves so easily to parody--and some of the happiest parodies ever
written were devoted to her in _Bon Gaultier_ and other books--did not
serve her badly with the general, for a parody always in a way attracts
attention to the original. Although her expression was not always of the
very clearest, its general drift was never easily mistakable; and
though she was wont to enshrine her emotions in something of a mist of
mysticism, they were in the main simple and human enough. It must also
be admitted that pathetic sentiment is almost the surest of popular
appeals in poetry; and Miss Barrett--partly through physical suffering,
partly through the bereavements above referred to, but very mainly it
may be suspected by temperament and preference--was much more a visitant
of the House of Mourning than of the House of Mirth. She was, yet again,
profoundly and sincerely, if a little vaguely, religious: and her sacred
poems, of which the famous and beautiful "Cowper's Grace" is the chief
example, secured one portion of the public to her as firmly as the
humanitarianism of "The Cry of the Children," chiming in with famous
things of Hood and Dickens, did another; "Isobel's Child," a pathetic
domesticity, a third; the somewhat gushing and undistinguished
Romanticism of "The Duchess May" and "The Brown Rosary," a fourth; and
the ethical and political "noble sentiments" of "Lady Geraldine's
Courtship," a fifth.
But it would argue gross unfairness in an advocate, and gross
incompetence in a critic, to let it be supposed that these popular
attractions were the only ones that Mrs. Browning possessed. Despite and
besides the faults which will be presently noticed, and which,
critically speaking, are very grave faults, she had poetical merits of a
very high order. Her metrical faculty, though constantly flawed and
imperfect, was very original and full of musical variety. Although her
choice of words could by no means always be commended, her supply of
them was extraordinary. Before her imprisonment in sick-rooms she had
pored on nature with the eagerest and most observant eye, and that
imprisonment itself only deepened the intensity of her remembered
nature-worship. Her pathos, if it sometimes over-flowed into gush, was
quite unquestionable in sincerity and most powerful in appeal; her
sentiment was always pure and generous; and it is most curious to see
how in the noble directness of such a piece as "Lord Walter's Wife," not
only her little faults of _sensiblerie_, but her errors of diction, are
burnt and smelted out by the fire of the expressed impression. Her
verse-pictures--for instance those in the "Vision of Poets"--vie, in
beauty if not in clearness of composition and definition, with
Tennyson's own. The Romantic pieces already glanced at, obnoxious and
obvious as are their defects, unite the pathos and the picturesqueness
just assigned to her in a most remarkable manner. And when, especially
in the Sonnet, she consented to undergo the limitations of a form which
almost automatically restrained her voluble facility, the effect was
often simply of the first order. The exquisite "Sonnets from the
Portuguese" (which are not from the Portuguese, and are understood to
have been addressed to Mr. Browning), especially that glorious one
beginning--
If thou wilt love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only--
(which is not far below Shakespeare's or the great thing which was
published as Drayton's), rank with the noblest efforts of the 16th-17th
century in this exquisite form. And if this, instead of having to
conform to the requirements of a connected history, were a separate
study of Mrs. Browning, it would be necessary to mention scores of
separate pieces full of varied beauty.
But in no poet, perhaps not even in Byron, are such great beauties
associated with such astonishing defects as in Mrs. Browning; some of
these defects being so disgusting as well as so strange that it requires
not a little critical detachment to put her, on the whole, as high as
she deserves to be put. Like almost all women who have written, she was
extremely deficient in self-criticism, and positively pampered and
abused her natural tendency towards fluent volubility. There is hardly
one of the pieces named above, outside the sonnets, with the exception
certainly of "Lord Walter's Wife" and possibly of "Cowper's Grave,"
which would not be immensely improved by compression and curtailment,
"The Rhyme of the Duchess May" being a special example. In other pieces
not yet specified, such as "The Romaunt of Margret," "Bianca among the
Nightingales," and especially "The Poet's Vow," the same defect is
painfully felt. That the poetess frequently, and especially in her later
poetical work, touches subjects which she does not very well comprehend,
and which are very doubtfully suited for poetical treatment at all, is a
less important because a more controversial objection; and the merits of
such a book as _Aurora Leigh_ depend so much upon the arguing out of the
general question whether what is practically a modern novel has any
business to be written in verse, that they perhaps can receive no
adequate treatment here. But as to the fatal fluency of Mrs. Browning
there can be no question before any tribunal which knows its own
jurisdiction and its own code. And that fluency extends to more than
length. The vocabulary is wilfully and tastelessly unusual,--"abele"
rhymed "abeel" for "poplar"; American forms such as "human" for
"humanity" and "weaken" for a neuter verb; fustianish words like
"reboant"; awkward suggestions of phrase, such as "droppings of warm
tears."
But all these things, and others put together, are not so fatal as her
extraordinary dulness of ear in the matter of rhyme. She endeavoured to
defend her practice in this respect in the correspondence with Horne,
but it is absolutely indefensible. What is known as assonance, that is
to say, vowel rhyme only, as in Old French and in Spanish, is not in
itself objectionable, though it is questionably suited to English. But
Mrs. Browning's eccentricities do not as a rule, though they sometimes
do, lie in the direction of assonance. They are simply bad and vulgar
rhymes--rhymes which set the teeth on edge. Thus, when she rhymes
"palace" and "chalice," "evermore" and "emperor," "Onora" and "o'er
her," or, most appalling of all, "mountain" and "daunting," it is
impossible not to remember with a shudder that every omnibus conductor
does shout "Pal_lis_," that the common Cockney would pronounce it
"Onorer," that the vulgar ear is deaf to the difference between _ore_
and _or_, and that it is possible to find persons not always of the
costermonger class who would make of "mountain" something very like
"mauunting." In other words, Mrs. Browning deliberately, or lazily, or
for want of ear, admits false pronunciation to save her the trouble of
an exact rhyme. Nay, more, despite her Greek, she will rhyme "idyll" to
"middle," and "pyramidal" to "idle," though nothing can be longer than
the _i_ in the first case, and nothing shorter than the _i_ in the
second. The positive anguish which such hideous false notes as these
must cause to any one with a delicate ear, the maddening interruption to
the delight of these really beautiful pieces of poetry, cannot be
over-estimated. It is fair to say that among the later fruit of her
poetical tree there are fewer of these Dead Sea apples,--her husband,
who, though audacious, was not vulgar in his rhymes, may have taught her
better. But to her earlier, more spontaneous, and more characteristic
verse they are a most terrible drawback, such as no other English poet
exhibits or suffers.
No poets at all approaching the first class can be said to have been
born within a decade either way of Tennyson and Browning, though some
extremely interesting writers of verse of about the same date will have
to be noticed in the latter part of this chapter. The next year that
produced a poet almost if not quite great, though one of odd lapses and
limitations, was 1822, the birth-year of Matthew Arnold. When a writer
has produced both prose and verse, or prose of distinctly different
kinds in which one division or kind was very far superior in intrinsic
value and extrinsic importance to the others, it has seemed best here to
notice all his work together. But in the case of Mr. Arnold, as in some
others, this is not possible, the volume, the character, and the
influence of his work in creative verse and critical prose alike
demanding separate treatment for the two sections. He was the eldest son
of Dr. Arnold, the famous head-master of Rugby, and was educated first
at the two schools, Winchester and Rugby itself, with which his father
was connected as scholar and master, and then at Balliol, where he
obtained a scholarship in 1840. He took the Newdigate in 1844, and was
elected a fellow of Oriel in 1845. After some work as private
secretary, he received an inspectorship of schools, and held it until
nearly the time of his death in 1888. He had been Professor of Poetry at
Oxford from 1857-67. He published poetry early, and though his fame at
this time was never very wide, he was known to those interested in
poetry, and especially to Oxford men, for more than twenty years before
he acquired popularity as a critic and began the remarkable series of
prose works which will be noticed in a later chapter. So early as 1849
he had published, under the initial of his surname only, _The Strayed
Reveller, and other Poems_; but his poetical building was not securely
founded until 1853, when there appeared, with a very remarkable preface,
a collection of Poems, which was certainly the best thing that had been
produced by any one younger than the two masters already discussed.
_Merope_, which followed in 1858, was an attempt at an English-Greek
drama, which, with Mr. Swinburne's _Atalanta in Calydon_ and
_Erechtheus_, is perhaps the best of a somewhat mistaken kind, for
Shelley's _Prometheus Unbound_ soars far above the kind itself. Official
duty first, and the growing vogue of his prose writing later, prevented
Mr. Arnold from issuing very many volumes of verse. But his _New Poems_
in 1867 made important additions, and in this way and that his poetical
production reached by the time of his death no inconsiderable
volume--perhaps five hundred pages averaging thirty lines each, or very
much more than has made the reputation of some English poets of very
high rank. Until late in his own life the general tendency was not to
take Mr. Arnold very seriously as a poet; and there are still those who
reproach him with too literary a character, who find fault with him as
thin and wanting in spontaneity. On the other hand, there are some who
not only think him happier in verse than in prose, but consider him
likely to take, when the "firm perspective of the past" has dispelled
mirages and false estimates, a position very decidedly on the right side
of the line which divides the great from the not great.
Family, local, and personal reasons (for Dr. Arnold had a house in the
immediate vicinity of Rydal), as well as the strong contemporary set in
favour of Wordsworth which prevailed in both universities between 1830
and 1845, caused Mr. Arnold early to take a distinctly Wordsworthian
bent. He was, later, somewhat outspoken in his criticism of Wordsworth's
weaker points; but it is impossible for any one to read his own poems
without perceiving that Arnold stands in a line of filiation from
Milton, with a slight deviation by way of Gray, through Wordsworth,
though with a strong personal element in his verse. This personal
element, besides other things, represents perhaps more powerfully than
it represents anything else, and than anything else represents this, a
certain reaction from the ornate and fluent Romanticism of the school of
Keats and Tennyson. Both, especially the latter, influenced Mr. Arnold
consciously and unconsciously. But consciously he was striving against
both to set up a neo-classic ideal as against the Romantic; and
unconsciously he was endeavouring to express a very decided, though a
perhaps not entirely genial or masculine, personal temperament. In other
words, Mr. Arnold is on one side a poet of "correctness"--a new
correctness as different from that of Pope as his own time, character,
and cultivation were from Pope's, but still correctness, that is to say
a scheme of literature which picks and chooses according to standards,
precedents, systems, rather than one which, given an abundant stream of
original music and representation, limits the criticising province in
the main to making the thing given the best possible of its kind. And it
is not a little curious that his own work is by no means always the best
of its kind--that it would often be not a little the better for a
stricter application of critical rules to itself.
But when it is at its best it has a wonderful charm--a charm nowhere
else to be matched among our dead poets of this century. Coleridge was
perhaps, allowing for the fifty years between them, as good a scholar as
Mr. Arnold, and he was a greater poet; but save for a limited time he
never had his faculties under due command, or gave the best of his work.
Scott, Byron, Keats, were not scholars at all; Shelley and Tennyson not
critical scholars; Rossetti a scholar only in modern languages. And none
of these except Coleridge, whatever their mere knowledge or instruction,
had the critical vein, the knack of comparing and adjusting, at all
strongly developed. Many attempts have been made at a formula of which
the following words are certainly not a perfect expression, that a poet
without criticism is a failure, and that a critic who is a poet is a
miracle. Mr. Arnold is beyond all doubt the writer who has most nearly
combined the two gifts. But for the present we are only concerned with
his poetry.
This shows itself distinctly enough, and perhaps at not far from its
best, in almost his earliest work. Among this earliest is the
magnificent sonnet on Shakespeare which perhaps better deserves to be
set as an epigraph and introduction to Shakespeare's own work than
anything else in the libraries that have been written on him except
Dryden's famous sentence; "Mycerinus," a stately blending of
well-arranged six-lined stanzas with a splendid finale of blank verse
not quite un-Tennysonian, but slightly different from Tennyson's; "The
Church of Brou," unequal but beautiful in the close (it is a curious and
almost a characteristic thing that Matthew Arnold's finales, his
perorations, were always his best); "Requiescat," an exquisite dirge. To
this early collection, too, belongs almost the whole of the singular
poem or collection of poems called "Switzerland," a collection much
rehandled in the successive editions of Mr. Arnold's work, and
exceedingly unequal, but containing, in the piece which begins--
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,