_The Problems of the Victorians_
By the time the Victorian masters were beginning to write, the
English language, in the common use of it, had thus gone through
many adventures. Shaping itself to the typical or representative
national temper and aspirations from one age to another, it had been
dominantly in succession naïf, lusty, sacramental, witty and didactic,
high-flown in its excesses, and then learned and argumentative with a
leaven of yeoman correction in it under Wordsworth’s control. These
characteristics had in turn passed into the texture of English poetry,
and each had left something of its mark upon the future practice of
the art, complicating it and making it more and more subject to a
conscious literary deliberation. And now the example of Byron, with
his cosmopolitan and sometimes journalistic use of language, of Keats
with his intense brooding upon and requickening of an antique mode, of
Shelley with his almost fanatical demands upon the spiritual resources
of words, had further extended the range of poetic diction and at the
same time increased the difficulties in the way of original mastery.
These problems may seem to be artificial as here stated, and in a
sense they are so. Poetry is neither more nor less difficult at one
time than another, given the poet. But in the light of achievement
we may not unprofitably consider what are the conditions that have
governed that achievement from age to age, and so perhaps at least
correct some of the false and easy notions that we are apt to foster
about the art of our own time, when we approach it unset in its right
historical perspective. Tennyson and Browning and Arnold and the
Rossettis and Morris and Swinburne give us the delight of experience
perfectly expressed, and that is the first, and in a way the last,
thing to be said about them as poets. But, coming when they did, they
were confronted with special problems in the practice of their art,
and we lose nothing of our enjoyment of their essential poetry in
understanding what those problems were.
English poetry was now nearly five hundred years old. In its
creation immense demands had been made upon the language, and many
characteristic beauties of poetic style might well have been supposed
to have been now explored beyond further possibilities. When Chaucer
wrote, the inspiration as of divinely wise and happy childhood could
shine through the most ingenuous of phrases, and the plainest statement
was touched by magic for ever in this playground of poetry’s infancy.
“O yonge fresshe folkes,” he exclaims, or “Now shippes sailinge in
the sea,” or “A nightingale, upon a cedre grene,” or “Ther sprang the
violete all newe,” and we have with every word the enchanted discovery
of poetry. Thereafter a poet might score a great effect now and again
by placing some such utter simplicity in the midst of subtler or more
elaborate statement, but it could hardly again be used as a customary
manner. What was then and has ever since remained triumphantly original
in Chaucer could but become commonplace on repetition. His way of
saying delightedly that the flowers were fresh and the birds were glad
and that apples were sweet, and saying these things just as simply
as that, stands beside his humorous invention of character as one of
the two chief glories of his poetry, but it was not a case of his
faintly suggesting a poetic possibility that could be elaborated by
his successors. He took the obvious and without embroidering it with
a single word made it into poetry of everlasting freshness, but he
did this once and for all, and poets after him would have to add some
touch of revelation of their own before they could make good their
claim. Chaucer could say that flowers were fresh and leave it at that,
giving us a perfect image of spring, but even two hundred years later,
in what now seems to us to have been still the dawn of English poetry,
Shakespeare had to make his impression with a far more complex image--
daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty.
By the time that Tennyson began to write, Shakespeare’s necessity was
even plainer. The thousand simple circumstances of nature and humanity
were still an inevitable part of the poet’s content matter. In the
course of a lifework of artistic creation he could not but want to say
a dozen times that the grass was green and the sky blue, the water
clear and love uncertain, and it is merely pointless to forbid him
these things because they have been said before. But apart from that
allowance of an occasional _cliché_, admitted because of some
virtue as contrast, as for example when Tennyson says--
On one side lay the ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full ...
he had to say these things with just as much originality of phrase as
would compel attention, and yet with not one word beyond this, or one
word too heavily weighted, lest he should be accused of inflation,
which is the death of poetry.
A second difficulty that Tennyson, to use the one example for the
moment, had to meet was in connection with the associative value of
words. When Chaucer was writing, words can have had little or no
associative value.[2] Even with Shakespeare they must have had far
less of this evocative power than they had three hundred years later.
Indeed, Shakespeare’s own language has unquestionably for us acquired a
certain patina from time. We read to-day--
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
and upon analysis we are aware of two separate sources of our delight
in the superbly used word “sessions.” Firstly, there is its purely
imaginative value. For Shakespeare, “sessions” can have had but one
literal meaning. In the framing of that line the common marvel of
creative imagination was performed. The poet deliberated upon his
thoughts gathering together for the survey of “things past.” It was a
process something formal and ceremonious that he had in mind, a solemn
conclave. Thus the ritual of the law would suggest itself to him, the
ordered gravity of a court, the pregnant occasion of a sessions. And
thereupon the two ideas would associate themselves, the perfect image
would be created, and with it would come the full exercise of our
imaginative powers in turn, of our best delight in poetry. For the bare
actual setting of the scene in his sonnet Shakespeare might have been
content with some such line as--
When to my mind I summon up things past,
but the informing vitality would have escaped. It is one of the
mysteries of poetry that when you translate her word into another,
although by logic it may seem to be the same thing, it is in truth
something essentially different. It is not quite a barren truism to say
that you can only say what Shakespeare said by saying what he said--
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past.
This, then, is the first value that we discover in Shakespeare’s use in
that connection of the word “sessions”--an exact functioning of the
poetic imagination. But over and above that there is yet another value,
one that is not very easy to define in set terms, and one of which
Shakespeare himself can hardly have been consciously aware. “Sessions,”
as we now read the word, calls to our mind, as it did to his, a court
of law with all its weighty circumstance; also, as we read it in the
sonnet, we get precisely the effect of pure imaginative effort that
Shakespeare got, or as much of it as is possible to our own faculty;
but the word has also taken on a strange atmospheric significance,
almost a shade of actual meaning that is beyond its original intention.
In its strictly imaginative value alone, the word was one that might
without offence have been more or less similarly used by one of
Shakespeare’s contemporaries or early successors, even after his
brilliant discovery of it in that context. Shakespeare’s choice of the
word was entirely admirable for his imaginative purpose, but it was not
so astonishing as to make it explicitly his own beyond the use of any
other poet who wished to escape the charge of mere theft. But as time
went on, the word, fixed there in its sonnet, underwent a spiritual
evolution, that for practical purposes was complete in any case by the
time Tennyson arrived, until it was in some sense of a newly acquired
nature, and no longer safe for any poet’s handling. The word could not
now be used in anything approaching the same context without calling
up in the reader’s mind the whole dark and passionate background of
Shakespeare’s sonnets. It has, in short, acquired a specifically
literary association which is to say--although some critics would
seem to overlook the fact--that it is the living witness of one of
the supreme moments of human experience, but also that it has become
so essential a part of that particular moment that it is now almost
impossible to use it in the service of any other. And when Tennyson
began to write he found a language that was strewn with words that had
put on this dangerous nature, beautiful and often as it would appear
irreplaceable words, yet now with calamity in their touch for the poet.
To reject them was by no means the same thing as rejecting the false
“poetic” inflation that had been the mark of Wordsworth’s attack. It
meant that by now a new discipline of a very arduous and vigilant kind
had become necessary in the practice of poetry. On every hand were
admirable and seductive instruments the use of which was forbidden. If
you were Keats you might privateer among the old poetry with profit,
but his success in this matter was the adventure of lucky genius, not
an example to be followed. Shakespeare could write
Not poppy nor mandragora
Nor all the drowsy syrups of this world ...
and Keats could find his Autumn sleeping
Drowsed with the fume of poppies ...
and be justified of his borrowing, but the exile from poetry of
“drowsing” and “poppies” in company, which had at least been suggested
by Shakespeare’s lines, was now in any case absolute. So that the
poet’s craft is already complicated in two ways. If Tennyson in his
verse wanted to recall the birds in spring, he could no longer rely for
his effect upon some simple statement such as “the happy birds sang on
the bough,” and further, in his elaborated image he had studiously to
keep clear, for example, of
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang--
although the chances were that this superb and complex image would be
insinuatingly persistent in his mind.
But these were not the only difficulties to be met in the management
of diction. I have referred to Byron’s occasional “journalistic use
of language.” Every now and again some one raises a false issue as
between journalism and literature, suggesting that literature is
arrogant in looking upon journalism as being less exalted than itself.
It is the same kind of silly baiting as is sometimes indulged in
between actors and dramatists, when it is indignantly suggested that
it is an affront to the admirable art of Burbage to hold that it is,
if the comparison must be made, on a lower creative plane than that
of Shakespeare. Journalism, decently practised, can be as honourable
and useful a profession as any other, and one to show natural gifts
of taste and presentation to great advantage. But journalism is not
literature, nor are its aims or methods those of literature. That
literature often appears in the journals is beside the point. The
essential condition of journalism is that it seeks either to report
a fact or an event in terms that shall be immediately intelligible
to the great mass of people, or to reflect an opinion from that mass
in equally intelligible terms for the satisfaction of the individual
units that make up that mass. Its business particularly is to accept
and to report, and when it uses invention--which it must be allowed it
often does--it is always invention of the wrong kind. To literature,
on the other hand, fact and event mean nothing until they are related
to an idea, or are seen in conjunction with character, or found to be
useful for illuminating the experience of a particular temperament,
and further, in precise contrast to journalism, literature seeks to
reflect an individual opinion for the benefit or pleasure of the mass
so far as the mass cares to take any notice of it. Thus “James Jones, a
casual labourer, was yesterday convicted at the Clerkenwell Sessions
of stealing a cigarette box, the property of Mr. Thomas Jackson, M.
P., and was sentenced to one month’s hard labour” is journalism, while
Mr. Galsworthy’s _Silver Box_ is literature. Again, “To-day we
celebrate the tercentenary of the death of one of the greatest of all
Englishmen. We have sometimes been called a nation of shopkeepers, and
yet no country is richer in her poets than England, and of these the
acknowledged chief is William Shakespeare. Here was one who sounded the
full gamut of human passions, and the universality of his genius has
carried his fame into every quarter of the civilised globe. We honour
not only Shakespeare, but ourselves in drinking to-day to the immortal
memory of one whose work will endure as long as the English language is
spoken”--is an example of journalism at its idlest, while Ben Jonson’s
panegyric and Arnold’s sonnet, separated by two hundred and fifty
years, are alike literature.
The flood of this journalism, considerable in Tennyson’s time and
almost devastating in our own, has added seriously to the poet’s
difficulties in the use of language. Whole tracts of English have
been turned over to the service of this business of conveying useless
information to people who are no whit the better for receiving it, or
of giving an appearance of independent profundity to rough and ready
mass opinion. The language has in consequence become so infested with
_clichés_ that a whole school of writers has arisen whose sole
ambition would seem to be an ostentatious avoidance of these. Byron,
the first great English poet to allow a humorous-ironic strain to run
through the body of his serious poetry, as apart from professed satire,
frequently made effective use of this journalistic quality in language,
and the practice has been a common one with explicitly comic writers
in verse ever since. But in doing this Byron exploited the growing
activities of the Press very happily to his own purposes, without in
any way enlarging the range of expression for poetry’s normal habit.
The success of his license, indeed, made the conditions of diction even
more exacting for his successors, since the journalistic _cliché_
once dignified by literary usage was more definitely than ever ruled
out as a poetic instrument. Fortune had rewarded the brave once, but
the second comer could only expect to be dubbed foolhardy. After Byron,
poetry had to remind herself that to relate her diction to the common
idiomatic speech of her time and to relate it to the sophisticated
periods of the leading article or the heavy facetiousness of the
debating room were quite different things. She had to be careful not to
be beguiled into doing seriously what Byron had done brilliantly with
his tongue in his cheek. She had brought off a very good joke out of
motley once, but that was enough; henceforth it must be played, when at
all, in full view with cap and bells complete. The improviser had for
once become the seer by some caprice of inspiration, and poetry would
be wise to leave it at that.[3]
Finally, Tennyson found a language that as a literary vehicle was
nearly five hundred years old, three hundred at least of which had
been of rich and unceasing activity. This fact presented a difficulty
distinct from that which has been examined in connection with
Shakespeare’s use of the word “sessions.” Not only had particular words
acquired a specific associative value which made them dangerous for use
again in poetry, but the whole construction of a poetic phrase was now
beset by mazes of seductive suggestion, word calling up word in long
sequence from the vast stores of poetry that had been accumulated by
the race. It was no longer a very easy thing to see the object before
you, precisely in its immediate appearance, wholly dissociated from any
company that it might have kept in some earlier creative presentation.
It needed something of a conscious effort in looking at yellow sands
to remind yourself that coral was not necessarily somewhere about, to
remember that an albatross was not positively doomed to meet its death
from a cross-bow, to hear the nightingale without hearing also the
undertones of “tears amid the alien corn,” to see a country graveyard
wholly unshadowed by the ghosts of village Hampdens and mute inglorious
Miltons. There was no simple way of escape for the poet from this
storied experience of his ancestry. He had to face it courageously
like the rest of experience, to assimilate and master it, and in so
far as it passed into his work at all, as it was bound to do in some
measure, to stamp it with his own pressure and so recreate it. But it
did complicate his task. We may now see how Tennyson dealt with this
and the other problems that have been presented.