_Tennyson’s Influence--The Diction of
Arnold, Rossetti, Morris and
Swinburne_
Broadly speaking, Tennyson and Browning have come in general opinion
to stand as the two chief figures in Victorian poetry. Personal
revisions of this estimate are constantly being made, and often with
much critical weight. But on the whole, and considering everything that
goes to the making of permanence in poetic reputations, it is doubtful
whether the popular impression will not continue to hold the day. In
detail the debate is an endless one, nor, so far as mere comparison is
concerned, is it a very profitable one. I for one find Matthew Arnold,
for instance, a more rewarding poet, with less waste tissue in his
work, and as time goes on richer in undiscovered country than either
Tennyson or Browning, but I should not allow my personal preference
to place him above them in poetic rank--the evidence against me is
too weighty for that. In the matter of diction which we have been
discussing, for example, in so far as poets can affect their own age,
Tennyson and Browning were beyond question the two most considerable
influences of their time. Tennyson showed his generation, in a degree
unapproached by any other poet who began writing with him, the still
fresh and vital possibilities of a great traditional manner. Browning
with equal authority demonstrated what were the likeliest methods of
departure and revolt from that manner. It is true that while Tennyson’s
example modified the versification of many poets in his own age,
Browning’s, though perhaps a more durable one, was far less immediate
in its effect. There was a definitely Tennysonian school, a number of
accomplished and genuine poets who would almost certainly have written
differently if it had not been for the direct influence of the master,
who, moreover, considerably affected the poetic expression of many,
indeed of most, of his more celebrated contemporaries. Here are a few
instances from the school--
Come, let us mount the breezy down (_a_)
And hearken to the tumult blown
Up from the champaign and the town.[6]
He roam’d half-round the world of woe, (_b_)
Where toil and labour never cease;
Then dropp’d one little span below
In search of peace.
And now to him mild beams and showers,
And all that he needs to grace his tomb,
From loneliest regions at all hours,
Unsought for, come.[7]
As ships, becalm’d at eve, that lay (_c_)
With canvas drooping, side by side,
Two towers of sail at dawn of day
Are scarce, long leagues apart, descried;
When fell the night, upsprung the breeze,
And all the darkling hours they plied,
Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas
By each was cleaving, side by side:
E’en so--but why the tale reveal
Of those, whom year by year unchanged,
Brief absence join’d anew to feel,
Astounded, soul from soul estranged?[8]
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead, (_d_)
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remember’d how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.[9]
The feathers of the willow (_e_)
Are half of them grown yellow
Above the swelling stream;
And ragged are the bushes,
And rusty now the rushes,
And wild the clouded gleam.
The thistle now is older,
His stalks begin to moulder,
His head is white as snow;
The branches are all barer,
The linnet’s song is rarer.
The robin pipeth low.[10]
O tender dove, sweet circling in the blue, (_f_)
Whom now a delicate cloud receives from view.
A cool, soft, delicate cloud, we name dim Death!
O pure white land-lily, inhaling breath
From spiritual ether among bowers
Of evergreen in the ever-living flowers
Yonder aloft upon the airy height,
Mine eyes may scarce arrive at thy still light![11]
Hear, O ye Lemnians, hear a full brief word (_g_)
Before I go, for surely from this day
My voice shall be a silence on your rocks,
My face a dimness with a few old men
Remembered hardly. As day fathers day
’Tis meet my memory pass; ay, meet that all
Change and be changed. So roll the stars along
And the great world is crown’d with silent lights
Watching her changes, and no thing endures.[12]
I need hardly say that I do not suggest that the poets from whom these
examples--almost at random--are given, and many who could be placed
in their company, are merely imitators of Tennyson. Men like Clough,
Dixon, and de Tabley were fine spirits finely touched to song. Clough,
to speculate idly, with a little more energy, might have found his way
into the great group of his age. Dixon was a lyric poet who has been
eulogised by so fastidious a critic as Mr. Bridges, which is warrant
enough for any man. And de Tabley constantly got to the summits, only
to find them too slippery for long foothold. But, individual as these
and the others were in their gifts, the extracts given are enough to
show clearly how susceptible the poetry of the age was to Tennyson’s
diction. Generally speaking, this was all to the good. Predominating
influences are inevitable among any generation of poets, and it was
no bad fortune for a large number of the Victorians to find so good a
preceptor. With one possible exception, everything that these poets of
real but not commanding achievement got from Tennyson was gain. They
took from him no eccentricity, but each according to his own powers
something of his new interpretation of a tradition that was the common
heritage. The possible exception was de Tabley, who, the more he is
read, the more he impresses with his very rare potentialities. He,
perhaps, alone among the poets of anything like his natural endowment,
made at times too complete a surrender to example. A careful study
of his verse convinces me that the lapses from excellence, of which
it is in danger at every turn, are almost entirely the result of an
habitual recollection, in relaxed moods, of Tennyson’s manner, which in
happier moments influenced him wholly for good. If, as I have already
suggested, he more than the others could sometimes catch the particular
enchantment in Tennyson’s use of words, the enchantment that save for
a stray note here and there came and went with the master, he also
suffered more than the others by reason of his very sensibility. He
could write--
Say what you will and have your sneer and go.
You see the specks, we only need the fruit
Of a great life, whose truth--men hate truth so--
No lukewarm age of compromise could suit.
Laugh and be mute!
but he could also write--
“And what is Love by nature?”
My pretty true-love sighs.
And I reply, in feature
A child with pensive eyes.
An infant forehead shaded
With many ringlet rings,
And pearly shoulders faded
In the colour of his wings.
Before returning to Browning, we may consider the influence that
Tennyson further had--Tennyson, that is again to say, as representing
the age’s normal modification of tradition--upon the diction of the
more celebrated poets of the Victorian era. Matthew Arnold published
his first book--_The Strayed Reveller and other Poems_ (apart from
prize poems at Rugby and Oxford) in 1849, when he was twenty-seven
years of age, and his second, _Empedocles on Etna_, three years
later. So little attention was paid to books that contained some of
the loveliest poetry of a century, that their author successively
withdrew each of them from publication when a few copies had gone
out, and they have become bibliographical treasures. With the two
volumes of _Poems_, 1853 and 1855, however, he took his place
among the acknowledged poets of the time, and although he has never
been everybody’s poet, he has never since then been without admirers
who would hardly admit any of his contemporaries as his better. The
nature of his poetry will be referred to in the proper place, but its
diction is of great importance in a study of the age’s versification.
Professor Saintsbury[13] (who is just a little inclined to stand for
the illiberal estimate of Arnold as a poet) says “he is most consistent
in employing, or at least endeavouring to employ, a severer kind of
diction and versification, drawing itself back from the florid and
flowing Tennysonian scheme towards the stiffer movement and graver
tones of Wordsworth, Gray, and (in his later years) Milton.” This is
very perspicuous, but the very fact that there was in Arnold’s style
something of a conscious drawing back from Tennyson’s manner implies
that the influence of the older poet was by no means without its
effect, and we shall find plainly that this was so. The fact is that
Tennyson, “florid and flowing” as he may have been at times, was far
from unconscious in much of his finest work of those models to whom
Arnold is said to have turned by way of escape as it were. Neither
Milton nor Gray nor Wordsworth could have written more gravely-toned
than this, the Tennyson of _Ulysses_--
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now the strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield....
and, on the other hand, it is impossible to miss Tennyson’s
modification of those models in much of Arnold’s representative poetry,
or at least not to be aware that Arnold’s own instinct is moving in the
same direction.
Alack, for Corydon no rival now!--
But when Sicilian shepherds lost a mate,
Some good survivor with his flute would go,
Piping a ditty sad for Bion’s fate,
And cross the unpermitted ferry’s flow.
And relax Pluto’s brow,
And make leap up with joy the beauteous head
Of Prosperine, among whose crownèd hair
Are flowers, first open’d on Sicilian air,
And flute his friend, like Orpheus, from the dead.
If that is a return to an older manner, it is an older manner with a
difference, and the difference is one that in the first place was of
Tennyson’s invention. Arnold was too personal a poet not to invest even
his acquired characteristics with his own stamp, but when we read verse
like this we know that Milton, Gray and Wordsworth were not the only
masters. And, in fact, Tennyson’s particular “linked sweetness long
drawn out” was not more certainly achieved by its originator himself
than by Arnold in such passages as--
Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?
Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon....
and
Thee, at the ferry, Oxford riders blithe,
Returning home on summer nights, have met
Crossing the stripling Thames at Bablock-hithe,
Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet....
and
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world....
and
Dost thou once more assay
Thy flight, and feel come over thee,
Poor Fugitive, the feathery change
Once more, and once more seem to make resound
With love and hate, triumph and agony,
Lone Daulis, and the high Cephissian vale?
Listen, Eugenia--
How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
Again--thou hearest!
Eternal Passion!
Eternal Pain!
Instances could be multiplied: they abound in Arnold’s poetry. It is
true that Arnold did, more perhaps than any other poet of his time,
bring back into verse something of the hard, jade-like, quality in
a phrase that was characteristic of Milton, and almost even more so
of Donne, Vaughan and many seventeenth-century lyrists, in a smaller
degree of Gray and Wordsworth, hardly attempted by Keats, and less by
Tennyson. It was a quality, it may perhaps be said, borrowed by poetry
from the great prose writers such as Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Browne
and Izaak Walton. It is a subtle quality, one difficult to get at or
define, a very attractive thing when well used, and yet a quality to
which many good poets are indifferent. When Tennyson writes, “His
captain’s ear has heard them boom Bellowing victory, bellowing doom,”
and Browning “And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue,” and Aubrey
de Vere “while such perfect sound Fell from his bowstring,” and Poe
“Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche,” and Longfellow “We can make our
lives sublime,” and Browning again “There’s heaven above, and night by
night, I look right through its gorgeous roof,” the words bellowing,
exquisite, perfect, brilliant (though Poe very nearly justifies
himself), sublime, and gorgeous are all words badly used in poetry,
mere counters taken lazily from the fingered stock of prose.[14] It is
precisely the poet’s business to translate such words as these into
poetry, to recreate the things that they stand for in the looseness of
common talk and not to take them over with all their imperfections on
them. In conversation, even in written prose, they have their place and
are well enough, but in poetry they won’t do--though most poets have
blundered in this matter at one time or another. It is not a case of
forbidding the poet simple and commonplace words; these he may use as
often as he will, if he can use them with mastery. He may say the moon
is bright, because that means something definite, but he may not say
the moon is exquisite, because that does not mean anything definite
at all. And he may not even say the moon is brilliant--or at least
not with any safety--because brilliant only means bright, which is
definite, plus a qualification which is quite indefinite; it pretends
to say something more than bright, but leaves us uninformed as to what
the something more is, and so becomes a pretentious word. If the poet
wants to emphasise the brightness he can do so by means of an image,
or even by saying very bright, if he can, as sometimes he can, beguile
us into honouring the “very” by rhythmic cunning. But “brilliant”
in poetry is inorganic. Sublime, bellowing, gorgeous and the rest
of them belong to a large group of words that are over-specific or
under-specific in meaning for poetry. “Bellowing” implies a very
particular kind of loud noise, but that particularity is of no
significance, and all that the word gives us in Tennyson’s verse over
and above, say, “sounding,” is something that it is not worth while
to give; it is too specific, so that in poetry it acquires a certain
kind of fatuity. “Gorgeous,” on the other hand, is not specific enough.
The margin of meaning in it beyond some such word as bright or starry
or shining or, perhaps, encrusted, is something known only vaguely to
each person as he uses it, and not communicated in any definite way
by the word itself. “Gorgeous roof” means nothing, in the sense that
it is poetry’s obligation to mean something, that is not accounted
for by “starry roof.” The added meaning remains something secret to
Browning. It is of no use in this connection to talk about poetry being
“suggestive.” The suggestive power of poetry should be something that
compels us to an effort of the mind that results in the creation of
a clear-cut image, not something directing us into a world of vague
sensations and guesswork.
Before proceeding to the next step in the analysis of the quality
that I have claimed for Arnold, there is another group of words to be
considered that might at first thought seem to be of the same kind as
those just mentioned. Perhaps “magnificent” is as good an example as
any. Why, it may be asked, should “magnificent” be suitable for poetic
use if “gorgeous” is not? Clearly we are on very hazardous ground, but
the way is, I think, none the less certain. We know that instinct has
told the common practice of poetry to accept the one and to reject the
other, and the instinct must have had some source in reason. Admitting
that what we need in poetry is exact definition, it can, I think, be
shown that there is this difference between the two words. “Gorgeous,”
in itself, means (let us say) “splendid” plus some unknown degree of
“splendour.” It is not a case of splendour of one kind plus--even
though it be in an unknown degree--splendour of another. So that it
depends for its very particularity upon a meaning that finally escapes
us, and not even Milton with his “Gorgeous Tragedy” can quite subdue
it to his art. But with “magnificent” this is not so. The meaning is
still “splendid” (let us say) plus something, but the something is not
now merely an undefined further quantity of “splendour.” It is, rather,
a particular qualification of splendour which is derived from the
context, and which, from the context, will nearly always be found to be
imaginatively specific. Thus, when Wordsworth says--
Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee ...
the figure of “the East” is hardly emphasised at all by “gorgeous.”
“Splendid” alone would have done the work as well, and not have
disturbed our sense of fitness by any pretentiousness. If Wordsworth,
we feel, wanted to say more than that the East was splendid, to convey
the distinguishing quality of that splendour, it was his business to
do it somehow precisely, and not to evade his responsibility by using
a word that, so far as qualification of “splendid” goes, leaves us
in the air. And, from some subtle essence in its nature, the word
“magnificent” would have served his turn. Had he said “the magnificent
East,” we should--or so it seems decisively to my perception--have
received the idea of “splendid” from the primary meaning of the
epithet, which epithet would in turn have, by its peculiar evocative
power, gathered to itself from the context the explicit kind of
splendour of light and colour and jewelled opulence that we associate
with the East. The word “magnificent,” in short, is an organic one in
poetry, while “gorgeous” is not. When Browning speaks of “that pulse’s
magnificent come-and-go,” we get the image of glowing health reinforced
by the idea of a superb physical power and functioning, conveyed
through the word “magnificent” in relation to “pulse.” “Splendid” here
would have been measurably less significant, while “gorgeous”--if we
may strain the word’s meaning for the purpose of illustration--would,
in qualifying “splendid,” have weakened the impression instead of
strengthening it. Again, as a last example, Sir William Watson in his
_Autumn_ has, within a few lines of each other--
At thy mute signal, leaf by golden leaf,
Crumbles the gorgeous year....
and
And passage and departure all thy theme
Whose life doth still a splendid dying seem,
And thou, at height of thy magnificence,
A figment and a dream....
the one of which is nebulous and the other shaped. And the language has
many pairs or groups of words, not necessarily synonymous but of a like
character, that fall respectively into the “gorgeous” or “magnificent”
class, as, for instance, valorous, heroic; and transparent,
crystalline; and regrettable or deplorable as against lamentable or
grievous; and vicious, malignant; and vague, dim; and conceited, vain;
and expensive, costly, and so on. It is hardly safe to say of any word
that it can never be used seriously in poetry, but of those given as
belonging to the “gorgeous” group--there are hundreds like them--it can
at least be said that poetry would almost always lose more than she
would gain by them.
Arnold’s gift of bringing a certain spare prose quality with profit
into his poetry is not, therefore, to be observed in his use of such
words as “magnificent” and the rest, which are naturally enough poetic,
and not dangerous so long as they are kept clearly distinguished from
the specifically prose “gorgeous” group. Nor, again, as we have seen,
is it to be found in his control of such simplicities as “the sun is
bright,” since these also are--or can be in right usage--essentially
poetic. Also it is a distinct thing from that other simplicity that
relies at moments of almost overwhelming emotion upon an expression
stripped of every syllable that can go and yet, throbbing with
momentum, having nothing in it of understatement; the kind of
expression of which Shakespeare was the supreme master--
Soft you. A word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know’t.
No more of that....
and
O! that a man might know
The end of this day’s business, ere it come;
But it sufficeth that the day will end
And then the end is known ...
and
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word....
The quality of which we are speaking in Arnold was, rather, a certain
sudden tempering of the diction in poetry, with magical result. It was
a quality that he more than any other poet of his time recovered from
the seventeenth century, the age of poets like Vaughan and Marvell who
could lift us to the height of poetic enjoyment with such prose-habited
devices as--
Where no rude foot e’er trod,
Where, since he walk’d there, only go
Prophets and friends of God....
and
The grave’s a fine and private place.
These are not at all in the same kind as “She should have died
hereafter.” They depend for their effect not upon the sudden release of
vast cumulative passion, but upon the lovely--almost arrogant--draft
upon commonplace, the perfectly judged use of “friends” and “fine”
at their utterly unexpected but divinely appointed moments. And this
effect Arnold could often come by, and the rest of the Victorians
hardly ever. Here are two examples--
I have a fretted brick-work tomb
Upon a hill on the right hand,
Hard by a close of apricots
Upon the road to Samarcand.
Thither, O Vizier, will I bear
This man my pity could not save:
And, plucking up the marble flags,
There lay his body in my grave.
Bring water, nard, and linen rolls,
Wash off all blood, set smooth each limb.
They say: “He was not wholly vile,
Because a king shall bury him.” ...
and
... and in his ears
The murmur of a thousand years:
Before him he sees Life unroll,
A placid and continuous whole;
That general Life, which does not cease,
Whose secret is not joy, but peace;
That Life, whose dumb wish is not miss’d
If birth proceeds, if things subsist:
The Life of plants, and stones, and rain:
The Life he craves; if not in vain
Fate gave, what chance shall not control,
His sad lucidity of soul.
The instinct that led Arnold to such expression as this was akin to an
austerity, sometimes stupidly confused with coldness, that is among the
rarest and most secluded of poetry’s enchantments, the austerity of
which the poet himself wrote--
Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay,
Radiant, adorn’d outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.
If Arnold stood in his age for a chastening of the “florid and flowing”
Tennysonian manner, though less unequivocally so, perhaps, than
Professor Saintsbury would seem to suggest, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
William Morris and Swinburne, in their respective ways, carried that
manner to its extreme emphasis. This, I need hardly say, does not
mean that the style of any of these men was exclusively derived from
Tennyson, but rather that the characteristic evolved by Tennyson from
poetic tradition that warrants Professor Saintsbury’s “florid and
flowing,” was developed by these younger poets into a poetic diction
that was drawn partly from Tennyson’s own sources and partly from
Tennyson himself. Just as the influence of Milton, Gray and Wordsworth
upon Arnold was modified by the intervening practice of Tennyson, so
was the influence of Chaucer, Spenser, Shelley, Byron and Keats in some
measure affected by Tennyson before they reached Rossetti, Morris and
Swinburne.
To set Rossetti’s _Blessed Damozel_ beside one of Tennyson’s most
highly decorative poems, _The Lady of Shalott_, for example, is
to be aware of a new weight in an atmosphere already heavily charged.
The graphic presentation of Tennyson’s poem is wrought with great
ingenuity of artifice, but the landscape, although it no longer has the
rain-washed clarity of Chaucer, is still in the open air. The golden
sheaves and the Camelot road and the lilied island have something of
the brightness of unfaded tapestry, but they have something also of
summer in Cornwall. In _The Blessed Damozel_ we have passed out
of day and night and are moving in a landscape of gold and blue and
rose thickly laid on gesso and stuck over with precious stones. It
glows through a mist of colour that is almost sensible to the touch,
and has been passionately created, not by God in Cornwall, but by
monks in mediæval cloisters. In Tennyson’s poem there is the artifice
of a very expert poetic craftsman, applied to a vision that is direct
and material, in Rossetti’s there is a genuine artificiality of
imagination, expressing itself in a diction suffused with suggestion
that is at once ethereal and strictly formal.
The blessèd damozel lean’d out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters still’d at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
These are no waters of earth, nor are the lilies and the stars--the
three and the seven--those of our familiar vision. The water is some
pool beyond the well at the world’s end, and the lilies and the stars
are such as might have been held one in each hand by the Prologue to a
fourteenth-century mystery play at the church porch.
Herself shall bring us, hand in hand,
To Him round whom all souls
Kneel, the clear-ranged unnumbered heads
Bowed with their aureoles:
And angels meeting us shall sing
To their citherns and citoles.
It is not a sufficient explanation of this to say merely that
Rossetti was a painter as well as a poet. Nor was it wholly that he,
beyond the example of any poet before him, sought to wring the last
voluptuous essence out of the very nature of words themselves. Nor,
finally, was diction of this kind simply the inevitable consequence
of the deliberate Pre-Raphaelite pact. Beyond all these contributary
causes, there was in Rossetti a native distrust of common life,
kept by his artistic vitality just this side of morbidity, that led
him to the creation of a world, lustrous, brooding, its _fauna_ and
_flora_ always a little fabulous, a world of murmured incantations and
living heraldry. Here Rossetti suffered the pangs and gathered the
compensations common to humanity, but his emotion, simple in character
though it was, found its natural element in this embroidered and
incense-laden world, and could not easily fulfil itself elsewhere. And
in the diction of his poetry Rossetti delineated his world exactly,
with its “twilit hidden glimmering visages.” Hardly any other poet, I
suppose, could have praised the beloved for her “sultry hair.”
Morris was profoundly influenced by Rossetti in his art, and there
was a close personal sympathy between them, and yet two poets could
not well be more unlike each other in natural temperament. Rossetti’s
heavy-lidded indolence, his exotic preference for odd beasts in the
garden, his savour of the apothecary’s shop, were far removed from
the robust worldliness of Morris, who loved Socialist meetings,
and Cotswold winds, and the dye-vats in a Staffordshire mill, and
fishing for pike in the Thames, and even a row in a police-court.
But the instinct for definite outline and exact detail that made him
whole-hearted in his sympathy with the Pre-Raphaelite painters in their
revolt from what they considered to be a smudgy and lazy impressionism,
made him also very susceptible to the luminous and graphic quality
of Rossetti’s diction, and, in that measure, guided him to his own
development of the “florid and flowing” Tennysonian idiom. But once the
impulse was working, it sent Morris along his own way of discovery, one
upon which he had no company of importance. As he progressed in his art
from _The Lady of Shalott_ and _The Blessed Damozel_, from
the lovely exercise of--
Green holly in Alicia’s hand,
_When the Sword went out to sea_,
With sere oak-leaves did Ursula stand;
O! yet alas for me!
I did but bear a peel’d white wand,
_When the Sword went out to sea_....
the world of mediæval and classic story became less and less mere
material for his poetry and more and more the actual place of his
habitation. No poet has ever so utterly projected himself into another
age as did Morris. Much has been written to show that Morris of _The
Earthly Paradise_ and Morris of the political platform were one and
the same person, and the doctrine cannot be lightly dismissed. But in
a sense Sigurd and Jason and Gudrun and Atalanta were more vividly
and intimately his fellows than the chairman and committee and the
men and women of his audience. Though he did not tell them so exactly
in so many words, his real ambition in going on to the political
platform at all was to persuade these men and women that the Sigurds
and the Atalantas were really the best company in all the world, and
there willingly for their delight if they would but know them. And
in moving among these people of a golden age (these people, that is
to say, as recorded by the old poets, Chaucer and the _troubadours_
and _trouvères_) Morris not only steeped himself in their physical
and spiritual life, he very largely caught and re-created the very
manner of their expression. He did something in the diction of his
poetry that had never before and is never likely again to be attempted
successfully, he made an archaic idiom a living, personal, and original
thing. The complaint about “Wardour Street” diction that has sometimes
been made against Morris is stupid and indefensible. His poetic style
may not please us in all moods, but when we are prepared for it we see
that, unlikely as was his method to bring about such an event by the
light of experience, it is as purely and individually a style as any
poet’s, and that he has borrowed nothing without transmuting it to the
strict degree of his obligation. When he follows Chaucer’s example and
speaks of the brown bird, or the grey sky, or the bright flowers, and
leaves it at that, we find ourselves accepting the image as complete,
so naturally does he adopt the accent of a fourteenth-century poet and
so far do we seem from the nineteenth century merely imitating the
fourteenth. And the whole of his diction is radically modified by this
circumstance, thus--
Ah! let me turn the page, nor chronicle
In many words the death of faith, or tell
Of meetings by the newly-risen moon,
Of passionate silence, ’midst the brown birds’ tune,
Of wild tears wept within the noontide shade,
Of wild vows spoken that of old were made
For other ears, when, amidst other flowers,
He wandered through the love-begetting hours....
At last
Into an open space she passed,
Nigh filled with a wide, shallow lake;
Amidmost which the fowl did take
Their pastime.
And even when his immediate concern, as in _The Message of the March
Wind_, is with the life of an age that is his own by accident as it
were, the manner still prevails--
Now sweet, sweet it is thro’ the land to be straying,
’Mid the birds and the blossoms and the beasts of the field;
Love mingles with love, and no evil is weighing
On thy heart or mine, where all sorrow is heal’d.
From township to township, o’er down and by tillage
Far, far have we wander’d and long was the day;
But now cometh eve at the end of the village,
Where over the grey wall the church riseth grey.
Criticism may tell us that “the land” is an inadequate generalisation,
that to say merely that it is “sweet” to be straying through it is
to say nothing, that “the birds and the blossoms and the beasts” are
poetic counters, that “where all sorrow is heal’d” is a sentimental
_cliché_ dragged in for purposes of rhyme, that “from township to
township” makes no figure on the map, that “long was the day” is trite,
and so on to its silly heart’s content. But if, when it has finished,
it fails to perceive the living spirit of poetry in those stanzas of
Morris’s, then we at least are not called upon to waste our energy in
disputing the matter.
Tennyson’s first book (excluding the _Poems by Two Brothers_)
was published in 1830, Arnold’s in 1849, Rossetti’s in 1870, Morris’s
in 1858, and Swinburne’s in 1860, although _Atalanta in Calydon_
and _Poems and Ballads_, by which volumes the character of his
genius first fully asserted itself, did not appear until 1865 and
1866 respectively. Rossetti was six years older than Morris and eight
years older than Swinburne, but he kept his poems, though they were
well known to his friends, unpublished in book-form for many years.
Among them all, Swinburne, the youngest, is the most perplexing as
a poet. Leaving the content matter of his poetry for mention in the
proper place, we find in his manner the apotheosis of the technique of
an age, we might almost say of many ages. With a poetic scholarship
as liberal as and more widely read than Arnold’s, an ear as sensitive
to the harmonics of words as Tennyson’s, a gift of incantation as
befumed as Rossetti’s, a sense of romantic story as poignant and of
English landscape as tender and sparkling as was Morris’s, and a
metrical virtuosity that was unknown to any of them, or, indeed, to
any other English poet, Swinburne was, technically, at once the most
unoriginal and the most accomplished of the great men of his age. Of
the particular poetic beauty that we have examined in Arnold--the
beauty of “prophets and friends of God”--he had nothing; the spare
enchantment of the seventeenth-century lyric was the one eminent grace
in the stores of English poetry that he did not gather up to his own
uses. He, again, went to the sources partly through Tennyson, and,
remembering this, it would perhaps put the matter in a word to say that
it would be a safe undertaking to match any particular excellence in
Tennyson’s diction, or in that of any of the poets who were influenced
in Tennyson’s direction, with a corresponding excellence somewhere to
be found in the work of Swinburne.
Sleep; and if life were bitter to thee, pardon,
If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live;
And to give thanks is good, and to forgive.
Out of the mystic and the mournful garden
Where all day through thine hands in barren braid
Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade,
Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants grey,
Sweet smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearted,
Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that started,
Shall death not bring us all as thee one day
Among the days departed?
In a passage such as this, not considering the nature of the
content matter, and setting aside qualities in the style peculiar
to Swinburne, there is clearly sounded in the actual writing the
note that distinguished Victorian poetry from the poetry of earlier
ages. The quality in this which is distinctively Swinburne’s own, as
it is in the great body of his work, is one in which the effect of
metrical movement, or more precisely the play of metrical movement
upon diction, is more important than it commonly was in the verse
of his contemporaries. As I have suggested earlier in this essay,
the technical originality of poetry by the time that Tennyson began
to write, if not, indeed, before that, was to be sought rather in
diction, the elements of which we have discussed, and in rhythmic
currents moving along more or less established metrical channels, than
in actual metrical invention. But Swinburne more than any other poet
of his time calls for modification of this statement. To distinguish
rhythmic beat from metrical pattern is difficult, perhaps impossible
to do by any rule-of-thumb. But a careful examination of Swinburne’s
verse as a whole reveals that, in comparison with poets of his own
stature, he had little rhythmic subtlety, a diction that was superbly
copious but seldom touched with the rarer magic of discovery, and a
metrical genius that, in its power, its variety and its essential
artistic significance, may be said without over-statement to remain
beyond the approach of any other English poet. While most people would,
I think, accept the generalisation without question, in so far as it
concerns Swinburne’s diction, they might question it in respect of
rhythm and metre. The average reader of poetry, whose business rightly
is to enjoy what he is reading before coming to a close analysis of
its nature, should he come to that at all, if asked what most struck
him in Swinburne’s poetry would probably say that it was its rich and
intoxicating rhythm. The trained critical mind, on the other hand,
might assert that, masterly as Swinburne’s metrical performance was, it
was hardly ever metrical invention. Both would be difficult to answer,
and yet I think both might be persuaded. We have only to take any
characteristic passage from one of the supreme creators of rhythmical
life, such as Shakespeare and Milton and Wordsworth and Keats and
Tennyson and Arnold, and to see how nervously the phrasing line runs
through it, to realise how little of this line there is in Swinburne,
and that the beat which rings so seductively or impressively in our
ears from _The Garden of Proserpine_ and _The Forsaken Garden_ and the
_Atalanta_ choruses and a hundred other splendid poems, is really a
metrical beat and not a rhythmical beat at all. And on the other hand,
while it would be dangerous to say that any single metrical form used
by Swinburne could not be shown to have its model in an older use, his
metrical abundance and ingenuity are so great, the new combinations he
makes so many and fortunate, the effect he produces so incisive and
unforgettable, that his use of metre may reasonably enough be allowed
as an original achievement of genius. It is not difficult to support
the whole position by a single poem or, indeed, by two stanzas of a
single poem.
Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear.
Let us go hence together without fear;
Keep silence now, for singing-time is over,
And over all old things and all things dear.
She loves not you nor me as all we love her.
Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear,
She would not hear.
Let us rise up and part; she will not know.
Let us go seaward as the great winds go,
Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here?
There is no help, for all these things are so,
And all the world is bitter as a tear.
And how these things are, though ye strive to show,
She would not know....
That is technically a sheer triumph of metrical skill. Of the
rhythmic line of which we have spoken there is nothing. Of the finer
enchantment of diction also there is nothing. In fourteen lines
there are over a hundred monosyllabic words, and it could hardly be
claimed for one of them that it performs any magical evocation, such
as do those words quoted of Vaughan and Marvell. The monosyllabic
commonplace of the diction is hardly redeemed by the few words that
have some stock poetic association, and the diction is, indeed, in
itself as insignificant as the rhythm. And yet this is lovely verse,
among the best work of a great poet, and its virtue comes from its
exquisite metrical authority. So pronounced is this that the absence
of rhythmical vitality does not matter, being made good by a metrical
beauty that under this poet’s direction is in itself something as
satisfying. And the poverty of the diction is no longer poverty, taking
from the metrical genius of the verse all that it needs of colour and
temperament. Swinburne’s characteristic contribution to the poetic
technique of his age was to show that great verse could be produced
without the greatest gifts of rhythm or diction. He had an ear that
was, in one sense, faultless, but it rarely caught the long haunting
undertones of poetry that flow about the structure of most great verse,
and he could command every device of verbal luxuriance without being
able to penetrate to the last spiritual recesses of language. What,
with all his powers, he lacked of greatness in these respects, he made
good by his one unchallenged mastery. Since of the three elements of
poetic technique, metre, rhythm and diction, metre is least inscrutable
in its nature, it followed that Swinburne was at once fatally easy of
imitation and less influential than any of his peers upon the living
tradition of English poetry. Dozens of poets have written very like
Swinburne, but no poet has ever written better because of him.