VICTORIAN POETRY
_John Drinkwater_
[Illustration:
DORAN’S
MODERN
READERS’
BOOKSHELF]
_DORAN’S MODERN READERS’ BOOKSHELF_
ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI
_Gilbert K. Chesterton_
THE STORY OF THE RENAISSANCE
_Sidney Dark_
VICTORIAN POETRY
_John Drinkwater_
THE POETRY OF ARCHITECTURE
_Frank Rutter_
ATOMS AND ELECTRONS
_J. W. N. Sullivan_
EVERYDAY BIOLOGY
_J. Arthur Thomson_
_Other Volumes in Preparation_
VICTORIAN POETRY
BY
JOHN DRINKWATER
[Illustration: GDH]
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1924,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
VICTORIAN POETRY
--B--
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
GEORGE GORDON
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
_Of all human ambitions an open mind eagerly expectant of new
discoveries and ready to remold convictions in the light of
added knowledge and dispelled ignorances and misapprehensions,
is the noblest, the rarest and the most difficult to achieve._
JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON, in
“_The Humanising of Knowledge_.”
It is the purpose of DORAN’S MODERN READERS’ BOOKSHELF to
bring together in brief, stimulating form a group of books that will
be fresh appraisals of many things that interest modern men and women.
Much of History, Literature, Biography and Science is of intense
fascination for readers to-day and is lost to them by reason of being
surrounded by a forbidding and meticulous scholarship.
These books are designed to be simple, short, authoritative, and such
as would arouse the interest of intelligent readers. As nearly as
possible they will be intended, in Professor Robinson’s words quoted
above, “to remold convictions in the light of added knowledge.”
This “adding of knowledge” and a widespread eagerness for it are two
of the chief characteristics of our time. Never before, probably, has
there been so great a desire to know, or so many exciting discoveries
of truth of one sort or another. Knowledge and the quest for it has
now about it the glamour of an adventure. To the quickening of this
spirit in our day DORAN’S MODERN READERS’ BOOKSHELF hopes to
contribute.
In addition to the volumes announced here others are in preparation
for early publication. The Editors will welcome suggestions for the
BOOKSHELF and will be glad to consider any manuscripts suitable for
inclusion.
THE EDITORS.
PREFACE
This book is called _Victorian Poetry_ for convenience. It does
not, it need hardly be said, pretend to anything like a thorough
examination of the voluminous poetry of the Victorian era in all its
aspects. Significant criticism of Tennyson alone, to take a single
instance, has already filled many volumes, a reflection which may well
make the title chosen for this little book look like an impertinence.
But while the present study does not profess to any exhaustiveness, it
is about Victorian poetry, so that I may perhaps be allowed the choice,
which is an easy one.
Certain omissions in the poets dealt with will occur to every reader.
Chief of these, perhaps, is Mr. Thomas Hardy, but although Mr. Hardy
might be claimed as at least partly Victorian in date he seems as a
poet to belong to a later age in everything else. His own achievement
is post-Victorian in character, and his influence upon the tradition
of English poetry is one that is too presently active for definition
yet awhile. So that I felt that to bring a consideration of his poetry
into these notes would be to disturb the balance of the scheme. The
same thing may be said, perhaps with rather less excuse, about George
Meredith. He, more strictly than Mr. Hardy, belongs to the Victorian
age, but it is by accident rather than by character. American poetry,
save for a casual reference here and there, I have not mentioned at
all. To have done so would not have furthered my design, nor could I
have done it adequately within that design. Whitman, who is a law unto
himself, could come into no design and needs a separate gospelling.
This brief study inevitably deals chiefly with the work of Tennyson,
Browning, Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris. Poets of almost
equal eminence, such as Coventry Patmore, Mrs. Browning and Christina
Rossetti, are less constant _motifs_, but, I hope, not unduly
neglected. Of the great number of less celebrated poets, who
contributed beautifully to the poetry of their time, I have referred
only to such as have afforded some apt illustration for an immediate
argument. Poets like Landor and Emily Brontë, although they worked into
the early part of the period dealt with, Landor, indeed, well into it,
have not been treated as Victorians, since they belonged by nature no
more to the Victorian age than did Wordsworth.
There could be no hard dividing line between the two parts of the
study. Frequent references to the content matter of Victorian poetry
were inevitable in a consideration of its technique, just as it has
suited the argument often to refer back from the substance to the
manner. For the rest, the main purpose of the essay has been merely to
note some poetical characteristics of an age and their relation to the
poetical characteristics of other ages.
I have used such terms as Augustan age and Romantic age as meaning what
they are commonly held to mean in English criticism. That their fitness
as terms may be sometimes challenged by critics of authority does not
matter for the present purpose. They are convenient labels and may as
well be used as any others. In choosing quotations for illustrative
purposes, I have inclined when possible to such passages as are
commonly known to readers of poetry, and since this book may be read by
some who are not so erudite as my critics will be, I have thought it
not superfluous to set out even so familiar a piece as _Crossing the
Bar_, shall we say, in full.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE ix
PART I
THE MANNER OF VICTORIAN POETRY
I. THE POET AND HIS AGE 17
II. DICTION IN ENGLISH POETRY 22
III. THE PROBLEMS OF THE VICTORIANS 54
IV. TENNYSON’S DICTION 71
V. BROWNING’S DICTION 92
VI. TENNYSON’S INFLUENCE--THE DICTION OF ARNOLD, ROSSETTI,
MORRIS AND SWINBURNE 102
VII. BROWNING’S INFLUENCE--R. H. HORNE--ALFRED
DOMETT--T. E. BROWN--COVENTRY PATMORE 142
VIII. CONCLUSION OF PART I 155
PART II
THE MATERIAL OF VICTORIAN POETRY
I. INTELLECTUAL FASHIONS 159
II. SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE POETRY--NARRATIVE
POETRY--MACAULAY--MORRIS--POETIC DRAMA 164
III. “THE IDYLLS OF THE KING”--TENNYSON’S
CRITICS--HIS METHOD--A DEBATABLE ELEMENT IN
TENNYSON’S WORK--MORAL JUDGMENT IN
POETRY--TENNYSON’S PUBLIC AUTHORITY 176
IV. THE RANGE OF SUBJECT MATTER IN VICTORIAN
POETRY--THE OCCASIONAL ELEMENT--MRS.
BROWNING--CHRISTINA ROSSETTI--FITZGERALD--SPIRITUAL
ECSTASY 209
V. LOVE POETRY AND THE VICTORIAN USE OF NATURE 221
VI. CONCLUSION 230
INDEX 233
PART I: THE MANNER OF
VICTORIAN POETRY
VICTORIAN POETRY
PART I: THE MANNER OF VICTORIAN POETRY
Chapter I
_The Poet and His Age_
The division of poetry into periods is artificial and yet not without
reason and its uses. If we look at the poets of an age at close
quarters we shall commonly find little resemblance between one and
the other. A liberal reader of poetry in 1670, for example, would be
discussing the recently published _Paradise Lost_, he would know
John Dryden as a poet who was establishing a reputation, he might
still have bought from his booksellers the first edition of Herrick’s
_Hesperides_ and have found on the poetry table the early
issues of John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Henry King, Richard Lovelace
and Henry Vaughan, among others. In these, his contemporaries, our
reader would naturally see an immense variety of technical method,
spiritual mood, and traditional allegiance. Cavalier and Puritan,
secular and religious, these would be schools clearly distinguished
in his mind, and little enough relation would be apparent between
the monumental epic of Milton and the primrose lyric of Herrick. And
yet these were all seventeenth-century poets, and at this distance
we perceive something characteristic in seventeenth-century poetry
that touched the work of all these men alike. We to-day are going
through the same experience with our own contemporaries. Two hundred
years hence Georgian poetry--and in this term I do not include only
the work of the poets selected by Mr. Marsh for his anthologies--will
have certain clearly definable characteristics which for the reader
mark it apart from the work of other ages. And yet to us, if we really
read the poetry and do not merely pick up a smattering of critical
generalisation about it, the differences must be found more striking
than the resemblances. At close quarters it is absurd to pretend that
there is any close kinship between the work of, say, Mr. Lascelles
Abercrombie, Mr. W. H. Davies, Mr. Walter de la Mare, Mr. John
Masefield and Mr. Wilfred Wilson Gibson. What happens is that there
are two governing influences in all poetry of any consequence, the
poet’s own personality, and the spirit of the age. That personality is
something which is plain to a sensitive reader from the first, but the
spirit of an age is hardly ever; definable to the age itself. Criticism
may already be sure about the personal quality in the work of Alice
Meynell or A. E. Housman, can in some degree say why it is personal
and mark in each case its particular contribution to the record of the
human spirit, but criticism cannot clearly at present say what it is
that relates these two poets to each other or both of them to Gordon
Bottomley. That there is such a relation only becomes an established
fact when we look back and see it asserting itself among the poets of a
period from one age to another. Milton was a poet engaged in a titanic
struggle with the problems of the soul, believing but battling always
for his faith, blending in one mood a stern asceticism with voluptuous
passion, a poetical technician familiar with every classic example and
at the same time liberal in experiment; and just such a poet in his
own measure was Matthew Arnold. Herrick, on the other hand, for all
his parsonage, was the lyrist of fleeting beauty, of ghosts in the
blossoming meadows, of exquisite and poignant moments, with no gospel
but that with beauty loved comes beauty lost, a poet who used simple
and established measures with perfect mastery and little questioning.
And so again on his own scale such a poet was Swinburne. And yet in
some essential respect Milton is of a kind with Herrick and Arnold of
a kind with Swinburne far more clearly than is Milton with Arnold or
Herrick with Swinburne. When the question of personal quality has been
finally considered Milton and Herrick remain of the seventeenth century
and Arnold and Swinburne of the nineteenth. The purpose of the present
essay is to ascertain as far as possible what it is that distinguishes
what we call the Victorian age in English poetry from the great ages
that preceded it. In order to do this it will be necessary to consider
the personal quality in several poets, but this will be done rather
to discover the common spirit than to present a series of individual
studies.