Chapter VIII

_Conclusion of Part I_

In the scheme of the present study no more need be said of the

technical side of Victorian poetry, nor need anything at all be said

of such specific matters of technique as rhyme, syllabic equivalence,

stanzaic structure, or prosodic abstractions, beyond to remark that in

all these things, although there is an infinite variety of practice,

the Victorian age added little that was essential to the history of

English poetry. Perhaps, indeed, it was inevitable, and in no wise

to be regretted, that it should add nothing. Further, to examine the

rhythmic achievement of the age would be to examine at length the work

of each individual poet, even to present a complete edition of each

individual poet’s works, since the rhythmic life of each poet is at

once as individual and as incalculable as are the gait and gesture of a

man. It has been my purpose, rather, to consider the many tendencies

that display themselves in the diction of Victorian poetry, since

in and through these can be most clearly marked the distinguishing

characteristics of any poetic age. In doing this I have necessarily

sometimes foreshadowed what there will be to say in the later part

of this study, where the content matter of Victorian poetry will be

considered, and where some poets will be dealt with whom it did not

seem necessary to mention at this earlier stage of the argument. What

cannot be told of the technical characteristics of Victorian poetry

from the examples of Tennyson and Browning and those other poets that

we have considered cannot be told at all.

PART II: THE MATERIAL OF VICTORIAN POETRY

Chapter I

_Intellectual Fashions_

Nothing is easier than for one age to be shallow and arrogant about the

spiritual and intellectual preoccupation of another. To active minds,

even the most cynical among them, life is such an urgent and absorbing

business, so desperately charged with significance, that it is easy

enough to suppose that contemporary methods of approach to it are the

only wisely chosen ones, and this particularly in contrast with those

of an immediately preceding age. I do not know that any critic of

to-day thinks that Homer was a liar or a fool because he believed, or

professed to believe, in the hierarchy of Zeus and the enchantment of

the Sirens, or complains that Shakespeare was a credulous ghostmonger,

or that Shelley, in holding that the world could be satisfactorily

governed by a quixotic political idealism, was only a little less inept

than Machiavelli, who thought that it could be redeemed by political

craft. We find no difficulty in accepting Homer and Shakespeare

(who, by the way, is just as likely to have actually believed in the

appearance of ghosts as not, and who made fairies real, when most

modern writers can do nothing but make them silly) on their own terms

in their relation to life. If we understand the functions of poetry we

are not the less moved by Milton’s description of the creation of the

world because we no longer believe that it happened in that way, and

I suppose there would be none among us found with temerity enough to

suggest that Milton himself did not believe it and that he was setting

his story down idly without conviction. In all these instances we

are willing to admit that it is not the creed that matters, but the

faith and passion with which it is held, and we will allow the poets

any conclusions they like so long as we are persuaded of their own

imaginative good faith. And yet this generosity is not always found

when the conclusions happen to be those of an age against which our own

lives are partly passed in reaction, and many honest critics who would

call Homer neither liar nor fool are misled into calling Tennyson both.

Among Victorian poets Tennyson is at the centre of a philosophic life

against which the intellectual habit of our own time is often in

active opposition. This being so, much may be excused to the excesses

of self-interest, and we can make some allowance, for example, for

a current mood that thinks it rather indelicate to speak about mere

goodness, when it reprimands a mood of yesterday that thought goodness

a very simple and natural thing to talk about. But to make allowances

for it is not to approve it, and it is about time for us to stop

making ourselves ridiculous by talking about the great Victorians as

though they were lost in a fog of superstition and prudery and moral

timidity.[16] We need not debase ourselves before them, but, also, we

need not talk as though the dawn of intellectual candour had broken

somewhere about 1900. It is all really such a little matter, the

difference, just a change of deportment, that is all. At many modern

tables, if you should speak of goodness everybody blushes or simpers,

if, indeed, there is not some very bold spirit to rebuke you openly.

But if you speak of the other thing every one is happily at ease and

you realise how fearlessly we to-day are facing the truth about life.

At our grandmothers’ table it was different. The freedom of to-day

would have caused consternation there, but our own inhibitions would

have been unintelligible. There have been loss and gain in both ways,

and the balance remains about the same. After all, it is just as

unaccountable to be discomposed by Tennyson when he makes Galahad say

My strength is as the strength of ten

Because my heart is pure....

as it is to be discomposed by Mr. Masefield when he makes Saul Kane say

I’ll bloody him a bloody fix,

I’ll bloody burn his bloody ricks....

In this study of the substance of Victorian poetry, therefore, we will

dismiss at once any suggestion that we are dealing with a period of

intellectual adversity. Tennyson and the group of poets who represented

in some degree or another Tennyson’s mood were neither keener nor

duller in the wits than the poets of other ages, and since we go to

poetry not for what we can learn from it, but for an invigoration of

the mind towards the establishment of our own learning, it need not

trouble us that Tennyson’s point of view happened in many ways to be

one that is peculiarly antipathetic to our own.

Chapter II

_Subjective and Objective Poetry--Narrative

Poetry--Macaulay--Morris--Poetic Drama_

There would seem to be two different kinds of material upon which the

poetic faculty can be employed. The old distinction of subjective and

objective has become loose in usage, as is the fate of all definitions,

but it is not a bad one for working purposes. If in the discussion

of æsthetics we begin to qualify our definitions too exactly we are

apt to finish up in a world of unintelligible refinements. Words when

used in argument have not the same quality and should not be expected

to perform the same functions as they do in poetry, qualities and

functions the nature of which has already been suggested. All modern

moralising, for example, has tended towards the rejection of such plain

words as good and bad. We no longer speak of a good man and a bad man

as the Old Testament and Bunyan did, and we can show very good reasons

for the rejection. Psychology has taught us that it is quite unsafe

to call any one just good or bad and leave it at that, and it is one

of the achievements of modern literary art, particularly in the drama

and in fiction, to explore with great subtlety the gradations by which

good and bad merge into each other in a single character. Nevertheless,

after such analysis has exhausted itself with every ingenuity, there

remain the words good and bad, and in the ordinary communication of

ideas we do know, with more or less precision, what is meant when some

one of normal intelligence tells us that so and so is a good man or

a bad man. And so with such words as objective and subjective in the

consideration of æsthetics. It is perfectly true to say that no subject

matter controlled by a poet’s art can ever be wholly one or the other,

but it is also true to say that if a narrative poem like _The Lay

of the Last Minstrel_ is spoken of as being objective in nature,

and a philosophical self-analysis like _The Prelude_ as being

subjective, we know clearly enough what is meant. If we go further and

say that in a work such as _King Lear_ we get the two natures

perfectly combined in one organism, we are still talking without wilful

obscurity, and we are explaining in a rough and ready way, and yet in a

way that is, perhaps, as good as any other, why it is that a work like

_King Lear_ shows poetry in its highest and most comprehensive

exercise. It is not that _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, in

presenting a graphic pageant of life external to Scott’s own personal

experience, has nothing of that experience woven into it, nor is it

that _The Prelude_ in its constant concern with Wordsworth’s

own spiritual processes has no observation towers that look out on

to the open road. But the external pageantry on the one hand and the

self-analysis on the other are quite clearly the predominant motives

of the respective poems, just as they are perfectly mated in _King

Lear_, where there is at once everything of the vivid perception

of a detached life that can be found in Scott, and everything of deep

spiritual responsibility that can be found in Wordsworth, the one now

transfigured by passion and the other lit by a new imaginative variety.

With so much definition, therefore, the terms subjective and objective

may be used for our present purposes.

Scott’s poems are the best examples in English of poetry that is

purely, or almost purely, objective. And the neglect of more recent

criticism has, I suspect, left them still in the possession of the

affections of many readers. They are not only the best of their kind,

they could not very well be better. The finer narrative art of Chaucer,

suffused as it was by a much more personal contact with its content

matter, stands really in æsthetic significance, apart from the question

of individual genius, with the art that produced _King Lear_. In

the Victorian age the art of Scott found its inheritors, and, although

the schoolmasters have done their best to kill _The Lays of Ancient

Rome_, Macaulay was no bad practitioner in a kind of which we are

foolish to speak slightingly because it does not happen to be the

highest. If we can forget the class-room and put prejudice aside, and

keep our sense of values clear, there is something amiss with us if we

do not thrill to passages, of which there are many in the _Lays_,

such as

Then out spake brave Horatius,

The Captain of the Gate:

“To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late.

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers,

And the temples of his Gods, ...”

and

Alone stood brave Horatius,

But constant still in mind;

Thrice thirty thousand foes before,

And the broad flood behind.

“Down with him!” cried false Sextus,

With a smile on his pale face,

“Now yield thee,” cried Lars Porsena,

“Now yield thee to our grace.”

Round turned he, as not deigning

Those craven ranks to see;

Nought spake he to Lars Porsena,

To Sextus nought spake he;

But he saw on Palatinus

The white porch of his home;

And he spake to the noble river

That rolls by the towers of Rome.

“Oh, Tiber! father Tiber!

To whom the Romans pray,

A Roman’s life, a Roman’s arms,

Take thou in charge this day!”

So he spake, and speaking sheathed

The good sword by his side,

And with his harness on his back,

Plunged headlong in the tide....

Macaulay was not by habit or any deep artistic intention a poet at

all, and the _Lays_ are little more than spirited footnotes to his

history, a point aptly made by Professor Hugh Walker in his scholarly

study of Victorian literature, but as such they are the work of a very

vivid talent and have a secure if humble place among the memorable

poetry of their age. There is no work of the time exactly comparable to

Macaulay’s unless it be that of William Edmondstoune Aytoun, but the

_Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_, far from being without merit though

they are, have no special characteristics that call for mention here.

All the greater poets of the age tried their hand at some time or

another at objective narrative verse, but Morris alone among them made

narrative a chief concern of his art. _The Life and Death of Jason_,

_The Earthly Paradise_ and _Sigurd the Volsung_,[17] together make up

a body of narrative poetry by virtue of which it would be difficult to

call Morris in this kind the inferior of any one but Chaucer. Morris

had not Chaucer’s sense of character, nor his humour, nor, perhaps,

the variety of his invention, but in pure narrative gift, the art of

keeping the reader’s attention fixed upon the progress of a long story,

it is doubtful whether he is to be placed even below Chaucer himself.

It is, however, when we call to mind that quality in Chaucer which,

I have suggested, gives his art something of the comprehensiveness

that is supremely achieved in _King Lear_, that we feel Morris, great

poet though he was, to have been definitely the less considerable man

of the two. Morris loved the world of his invention, and loved it

passionately, but his narrative poetry is not quite authoritatively

marked by his own spiritual agonies and exultations. In speaking of

so noble a poet, and one so rich in pleasure-giving, one would say

nothing that should savour at any distance of disparagement. Nor is

Morris to be belittled because Chaucer was his master, not only by

example, but by achievement. At the same time, in Morris’s narrative

poetry, however splendidly it may compel every other honour, there is

to those who love it a perplexing something which leaves it short of

the very highest. In a strange and impalpable way it seems as though

he had withheld some last heart-beat from its creation. His claim,

frequently made, that the writing of poetry was easy is not without

some symbolic significance. It may have been that Morris was too happy

a man to be quite among the very greatest poets. His verse stories

leave us with a feeling that he is not utterly exhausted after the

act of creation, that the figures of his invention, tender and virile

though they are, remain outside the inner secrecies of his own emotion.

There is, in fact, a larger preponderance of exclusively objective

intention in his work than in Chaucer’s, and by so much he means the

less in the final poetic reckoning. This is not to forget that, by

comparison with any narrative poet other than Chaucer, Morris’s work

is flooded with subjective passion, far beyond that of Macaulay or of

Scott himself. In the earlier part of this study I have suggested that

Morris really lived in the world of his stories more actually than

in the nineteenth century, and that is, I think, the truth. But his

capacity for imaginative life at all, immense though it was, had always

just a strain of decorative facility that marked it a little apart from

the constant imaginative pressure that we find in Chaucer. Morris told

us magnificent stories, very moving and quick with heroic life, and to

read them is to pass into a world of living and significant romance.

But, remembering our own mortality, he has not the touch of revelation

that was so easily Chaucer’s, not quite the same breath of apocalyptic

love.

The narrative work of the other great Victorian poets hardly calls for

special consideration, being incidental to and of a part with their

normal practice, not the result, as with Morris, of a specific artistic

plan. But at this point a word may be said of the many dramas that were

written during the age, in which we should expect from the nature of

this form something of that unification which has been referred to in

what has been said about Chaucer and _King Lear_. The Victorian

poets as playwrights, and they nearly all tried their hands at the

craft, suffered from the radical disability of having no living theatre

in which to learn their craft and in which to see their invention come

to full embodiment. This is not the place to discuss the reasons why

it came about, but the fact remains that when Tennyson began to write

the English theatre had long since driven out the spirit of poetry,

and continued to enforce the exile during the whole of his long life.

The waste of energy incurred by Tennyson and Browning and Morris and

Swinburne and Arnold, not to name a number of less celebrated men,

in the writing of plays (of the succession of poets preceding them

the same thing could be said) is one of the tragic futilities both of

English literature and of the English theatre. It was a time when the

actor had achieved complete ascendency in the theatre and when what

he wanted was, not creative poets whose works he could perform, but

hack playwrights who could serve the purpose of his own histrionic

virtuosity. No more of this need be said here, but the list of

Victorian plays written by men of great poetic gifts is a pathetic

witness of the indomitable aspirations of the English genius towards

drama and of the shameless indifference through long periods of the

theatre towards those aspirations. What these men might have done in

a fortunate theatre cannot be said, but in view of the very imperfect

evidence available it would be quite unsafe to say of any one of them

that he had not the gifts that would have served a great theatre

greatly. In the event, their dramas were, for the most part, little

more than elaborated lyrics thrown arbitrarily into an inert dramatic

form. That is to say, lacking the theatre, and the formative influence

of the theatre, the objective quality which is the first essential of

drama never came into full play at all. Shakespeare, as I suggested

above, was a skilled playwright because he had this objective faculty

in a measure only equalled, perhaps, by Homer, and a great playwright

because he impregnated it with a subjective sense of equal supremacy.

But, whereas it needs a subjective sense to make a great drama,

drama of sorts can come to a kind of life in the theatre through the

objective faculty alone, while without the objective faculty you cannot

have drama which will hold the stage at all. And it was the opportunity

to develop that objective sense in dramatic terms that was denied the

poetic genius of the Victorian age, as it had been denied the poetic

genius since the passing of the Restoration comedies. So that anything

that is worth saying about the drama of the Victorian poets will be

covered by the consideration of their poetry in general, and we may

dismiss the specifically dramatic intention in it.

Chapter 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_

The point of attack chosen by most of Tennyson’s detractors is

the _Idylls of the King_. Detraction is ultimately a very

inconsiderable force in the world, being exposed readily enough by the

minds that know anything of the thing against which it is directed, and

being of no consequence either way in its action on minds that know

nothing of it. People who really read Tennyson can readily enough rebut

the unthinking and often envious charges that are made against him,

while it does not matter what effect these may have upon the people

who do not read him at all. There is, nevertheless, in the evolution

of a poet’s reputation the necessary sifting from time to time of the

evidence and a revaluation of the old judgments. The reaction against

Tennyson that set in, as with all poets, for a period after his death,

discovered many faults in his work which clearly enough were faults,

but it has allowed these far too great an importance in the general

estimate of his poetry.

The common opinion, even the common critical opinion of some authority,

that has been expressed in recent years about the _Idylls of

the King_ is a striking instance of this lack of balance and

generosity. In the first place, we have been told over and over again

that Tennyson emasculated Malory, that the new poet’s Arthur was a

Victorian gentleman reflecting the stiff glories and virtues of the

Prince Consort’s train, not the fiery warrior with a vigorous paganism

shining through his Christian professions that lives in the pages of

the old chronicler, and that the ladies of the _Idylls_ have

become stultified by the proprieties of a later court than Guinevere’s.

Setting aside the sneer implied by the use of the figure of Victorian

gentility, a sneer that really bears far less examination than its

agents may suppose, the charge is a true one, but it is difficult to

see why it should be held to be very damaging to Tennyson. It may be

readily allowed that his world, his sense of character, and his ideals

of conduct, were not precisely, or even approximately, those of Malory,

but I am not aware that he ever claimed that they were, or that in

using the figures of Arthurian legend he was not as entirely justified

in making his own interpretation as Malory had been in his own time

in making his. Nothing is sillier in criticism than to come to an

artist’s presentation of a legendary, a romantic, or even an historical

figure with an already fixed idea of what that presentation should be.

The evidence about these things in almost every case leaves the way

open to a dozen conclusions, any one of which may carry conviction so

long as the artist is capable of creative singleness of heart. We are

really impertinent if we demand that Tennyson should make of Arthur

and Enid and Geraint and Lancelot and Guinevere and Merlin and Vivien

something that squares with our anterior impressions gathered from

Malory. All we are justified in demanding is that Tennyson shall give

them life which would convince us of its reality had we never heard of

them before. If it be argued that in that case Tennyson might just as

well have invented a _personnel_ of his own, the answer is that

the poet since the beginning has always, and justly, felt himself to

be at liberty to draw upon the common stock of legend and history so

that he may profit by the appeal made by a familiar setting and invest

his creation with the elemental vitality that comes from association.

When the Greek audiences went to see a new tragedy by one of their

masters they knew beforehand that they would be shown a _dramatis

personæ_ with whose existence they were already familiar, and so the

poet started off with the advantage of having an audience that took

it for granted that the people of his play were really alive. But the

gain carried with it for him no obligations, or, at least, none that he

would not as a matter of course instinctively fulfil. That is to say,

provided he did not positively turn the accepted tradition inside out

he was not only allowed to make what new reading of it he liked, but he

was actually expected by his audience to do this. And so it was with

Tennyson in his _Idylls_. Had he made Arthur a lecherous bandit,

or Enid a nagging vixen, or Lancelot a saintly anchorite, or Guinevere

an evil light-of-love, then we could have complained with justice that

he should have found other names for his creations. But he did none of

these things. In their central nature the figures of his _Idylls_

retain the essential characteristics that had belonged to them from the

legends of the old days, and it is only in his modifications of these,

often, it may be readily admitted, emphatic in character, that Tennyson

reflected his own instincts and the spirit of his age.

To acknowledge the fitness of those modifications is as much the

obligation of fair criticism as it is not to overstate them. It is

true that every now and again we get a line or a phrase touched by

the fashion of the moment that now seems a little grotesque to us,

in the same way that at our particular range of time the bonnets and

antimacassars of our grandmothers seem a little grotesque.[18] But

in themselves these touches are not really odd, but only twigs, as

it were, that have lost their sap in the larger spread of timber,

as will happen in every permanent body of poetry. When we read that

Geraint withheld punishment from the dwarf through “pure nobility of

temperament,” that he was “a little vext at losing at the hunt,” when

we hear that Vivien in her dissembling put on the appearance of “a

virtuous gentlewoman deeply wrong’d” we may be amused for a moment.

But the then current idiom of chivalry was not really any more absurd

than the more ancient one of false traitors and perfect knights and

fair damsels, and, in any case, we lose our sense of proportion if on

the strength of it we make a commotion about Tennyson’s intellectual

provincialism. These things, when they are all of them accounted for in

his work, amount to the merest accident of an occasional gesture in the

whole general bearing of the man, and in some kind, if not precisely

in that kind, they can be matched in every poet. With more claim to

attention than these trivialities are lines something of the same kind

but of a deeper purport, such as those when Merlin speaks of the king as

O true and tender! O my liege and king!

O selfless man and stainless gentleman....

“Stainless gentleman” has a certain poetic flatness to our ears which

it had not for Tennyson and his readers. To-day it is not supposed

to be good form to speak about a man being a gentleman at all, and

democracy no longer encourages us to think about a man being a

gentleman at all. We are all now (at least we all may be) nature’s

gentlemen, and much may be said for the doctrine. Tennyson was part of

a society where the aristocratic distinction was not merely a reality

in fact, but one acknowledged intellectually, and the more we see of

the world the less certain can we be that any one stage in social

development is demonstrably better than another. “Change is the law

of life on earth,” says Mr. Gosse, and each generation may suppose

that the change is for the better, though one may to-day, for example,

meet very liberal-minded and generous people who can make out a very

good case for a return to feudalism. But we can cut the argument short

by saying that when Tennyson (or Merlin) spoke of Arthur as being a

“stainless gentleman” he was being neither a prig nor a sycophant. He

might sing that

Kind hearts are more than coronets,

And simple faith than Norman blood....

but there was also room in his scheme of things for the specific

distinction that saved

O true and tender! O my liege and king!

O selfless man and stainless gentleman....

from being merely tautological. And if it comes to that, Tennyson here

was nearer than some of his critics to the spirit of Malory. It is well

enough to be of our time in matters of social faith and use the world

as we find it. To be doctrinaire in politics is mostly to be futile,

but habits of expediency which are bred by trying to make the best of

social schemes at the moment should be dropped when we turn to the

criticism of poetry.

If we dismiss these petty difficulties of manner, we shall find that

in their main construction the _Idylls_ present a life which is

very unlike that which is suggested by their detractors. The anæmic and

Gilbertian curates and schoolmarms who are supposed to people the poems

in a pleasant Sunday afternoon atmosphere have no being at all when

we come to examine the poems themselves. Taking Tennyson by himself,

without reference to Malory or any other source, we may surmise that

the men of the poems, the very Galahad and Lancelot and Bedivere and

Geraint of Tennyson’s creation, that is to say, would have displayed a

decision of character and a strength of arm that would shake some of

the long-eared critics out of their complacency and perhaps afford them

a little wholesome exercise. And if any one thinks that he could behave

by any but the strict rules of chivalry in the presence of Tennyson’s

Guinevere there is something amiss with his schooling. If no better

evidence can be advanced for Victorian effeminacy and prudery and

coxcombry than the _Idylls of the King_ the charge must go by the

board. Finally, in this respect we need hardly defend Tennyson because

he sometimes chooses to point a moral as well as to adorn a tale, as

when in the middle of the Enid story he breaks off with

O purblind race of miserable men,

How many among us at this very hour

Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves,

By taking true for false, or false for true;

Here, thro’ the feeble twilight of this world

Groping, how many, until we pass and reach

That other, where we see as we are seen....

This practice has always been and will always remain a prerogative of

poetry and it is not purism but frivolity of intellect that objects to

it.

The actual poetic achievement of the _Idylls_ is very great. That

as a group they have no architectural unity is true, but they have

never professed such unity. As separate stories they are graphically,

and often very poignantly told, with innumerable touches of great

felicity. They are pervaded by Tennyson’s descriptive gift and yet

it is always closely woven into the imaginative texture and hardly

ever indulged (as it was often by even so great a poet as Swinburne,

for example) for its own sake. When Geraint comes to the town of the

sparrow-hawk where

In a long valley, on one side of which,

White from the mason’s hand, a fortress rose;

And on one side a castle in decay,

Beyond a bridge that spann’d a dry ravine:

And out of town and valley came a noise

As of a broad brook o’er a shingly bed

Brawling, or like a clamour of the rooks

At distance, ere they settle for the night....

the fortress is not merely an effective piece of decoration in the poem

but part of its essential life, just as in the shoal

Of darting fish, that on a summer morn

Adown the crystal dykes at Camelot

Come slipping o’er their shadows on the sand....

and when Geraint rides

into the castle court,

His charger trampling many a prickly star

Of sprouted thistle on the broken stones....

the image is hardly less at the centre of things than Shelley’s superb

“blue thistles bloomed in cities,” of which it is inevitably, but

finely, reminiscent. Geraint’s splendid challenge to Edyrn’s labourers,

beginning “A hundred pips eat up your sparrow-hawk,” Yniol’s beautiful

iteration of the refrain in Enid’s song, “Our hoard is little but our

hearts are great,” Lancelot’s discovery to Lavaine on their approach

to Camelot, “Hear, but hold my name Hidden, you ride with Lancelot of

the Lake,” are but casual instances of the abounding poetic energy

that informs the poems. Nor are there wanting yet greater triumphs of

the imagination, things at the very heart of poetic mastery. Geraint’s

self-imposed penance never to ask Enid the significance of the

accusation which he supposed he had heard her make against herself is

a master-stroke of vision of which the dramatic genius of Shakespeare

himself might have been proud, while I know of no moment in all English

poetry more surging with the tides of tragic and heroic beauty than

that in which the great Arthurian epic comes to its close, with the

throwing of Excalibur back into the Cornish water.

So flash’d and fell the brand Excalibur:

But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm

Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,

And caught him by the hilt, and brandish’d him

Three times, and drew him under in the mere....

The power of visualisation here is tremendous. The lines are charged

with a mystery that has in it nothing that is inexact or nebulous, and

we see not an enchanted pool of a romantic wonderland, but an actual

water by the rockbound Cornish coast, the heart of a country where

was played out the immortal drama of England’s legendary chivalry.

Here is the beauty that transcends the beauty of pathos, the beauty of

trembling and poignant vision such as we find in some great chorus of

Euripides. By the evidence of such things, which are not seldom within

Tennyson’s reach, it is a very lean and jealous humour of criticism

that can deny him a place among even the greatest.

A more debatable element in Tennyson’s work may also be illustrated

from the _Idylls_. When Arthur takes his last leave of Guinevere

at the Almesbury convent he follows a touching recital of the founding

and the character of the Round Table with an uncompromising indictment

of Guinevere’s sin. He announced separation as the only possible course

to be taken in spite of his professions of indestructible love, and

the assurance in which, perhaps, may be found just a grain of comfort

for the detractors, “Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God forgives.”

Guinevere accepts the impeachment and its consequences and in turn

renounces her allegiance to Lancelot, not only in her life but in her

heart, and the crux of the argument may be given in this passage from

the king’s parting charge--

“How sad it were for Arthur, should he live,

To sit once more within his lonely hall,

And miss the wonted number of my knights,

And miss to hear high talk of noble deeds

As in the golden days before thy sin.

For which of us, who might be left, could speak

Of the pure heart, nor seem to glance at thee?

And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk

Thy shadow still would glide from room to room,

And I should evermore be vext with thee

In hanging robe or vacant ornament,

Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair,

For think not, tho’ thou wouldst not love thy lord,

Thy lord has wholly lost his love for thee.

I am not made of so slight elements.

Yet must I leave thee, woman, to thy shame.

I hold that man the worst of public foes

Who either for his own or children’s sake,

To save his blood from scandal, lets the wife

Whom he knows false, abide and rule the house:

For being thro’ his cowardice allow’d

Her station, taken everywhere for pure,

She like a new disease, unknown to men,

Creeps, no precaution used, among the crowd,

Makes wicked lightnings of her eyes, and saps

The fealty of our friends, and stirs the pulse

With devil’s leaps, and poisons half the young.

Worst of the worst were that man he that reigns!

Better the King’s waste hearth and aching heart

Than thou reseated in thy place of light,

The mockery of my people, and their bane.”

This is a long instance to set out but it will serve, not only for

the immediate purpose of discussion, but as a text for more general

consideration of a prevalent attitude in Victorian poetry of which

Tennyson was the chief exemplar. When every allowance has been made

for dramatic detachment, we cannot but suppose that the passage quoted

embodies a belief to which Tennyson himself would have subscribed, and

it is difficult to get away from the feeling that there is something

radically unsound in it. Every spectator of _Othello_ must have felt

the impulse to leap on to the stage and cry upon Othello to come to his

senses and realise that even if he cannot see that he is being fooled

by a villain he should at least sit down and have the matter out with

Desdemona. By his end Othello becomes a noble and heroic figure, but,

even allowing that he discovers in the action what seem to him to be

sufficient grounds for the cruellest of his suspicions, we can never

feel in the body itself of the play that his jealousy is anything but

contemptible. Had Shakespeare’s method been different, and had he

concealed the truth from us as he does from Othello, or had our opinion

inclined towards Desdemona’s guilt until the final revelation, we

could still not but have felt that she was tolerable company at least

compared with her termagant and demoniac husband. But Shakespeare saw

that Othello was an immensely attractive figure as an expression of

life, without for a moment insisting that he was an admirable figure on

the less elementary and yet in a sense lower plane of conduct. That is

to say, Shakespeare could worship the nature in Othello as he could

worship all vivid life, and he could present the moral limitations of

that nature with the deepest sympathy, even without any implication of

blame, but he was never in danger of confusing them with moral virtues.

So far as there is any deliberate doctrine to be found in Shakespeare’s

art, indeed, the jealousy of Othello, even though it had been proved

to be as well founded as he himself supposed, is shown to have been as

disastrous in its tragic destruction of character as the blood-guilty

ambition of Macbeth or the drunken passion of Antony. But Tennyson,

although he was vitally interested in life, and honest enough in his

acceptance of the processes of life so far as he could interpret them,

had also certain abstract moral points of view which he was apt to

impose upon those processes in the course of creation. In this there

is a difference between the artistic purposes of the two poets, a

difference that had really been slowly asserting itself in English

poetry from the end of the Shakespearean era until Tennyson’s time. It

is a difference that on the whole must definitely mark the later poetry

as less unadulterated in its creative aims than the earlier, and it

is a difference, further, that has led to grave misconceptions in the

modern practice of the art.[19] It may be worth while to analyse this

difference a little more closely.

It is clearly a mistake to suppose that moral judgment did not come

within Shakespeare’s scheme. Every one of his plays from the dark and

terrible pity of _Lear_ to the light and gracious revelry of _Twelfth

Night_ is charged with moral judgment, but it is a judgment that is

strictly complementary to the action of the characters within the play,

and as organically a concern of the poet’s creative function in the

play as are the characters and action themselves. In other words, the

moral judgment becomes inevitably a part of life itself, and is an

altogether profounder thing than a merely abstract moral point of view.

And this, indeed, is one of the chief glories of Shakespeare’s art, as

of the whole poetry of his age, that it is intensely concerned with

life, with its moral consequences, but it is hardly at all concerned

with moral points of view that are not directly the consequence of

life as it grows at the poet’s bidding. That is why we feel that

Shakespeare loved Macbeth, whose moral conduct he must have condemned,

no less than Rosalind, whose conduct he as certainly sanctioned. Both

were a part of the life to which he brought the constant homage of

genius, and although that genius could not but award disaster to one

and happy honour to the other, there was no prefixed moral rule to be

applied with a consequent alienation of affection in the one case and

establishment of it in the other before the final reckoning was made.

So soon after Shakespeare as Milton the difference begins to show

itself. The explicit purpose of _Paradise Lost_, a purpose happily not

too constantly kept in mind, is “to justify the ways of God to men,”

and with this implication that a standard has to be set up from the

first whereby a man can be shown to be morally at fault and wilfully

to have disobeyed rules laid down for his guidance, the abstract moral

point of view is beginning to assert itself, and although Milton’s

art is sublime enough to make the disability of little account in

the result, there is something less universal in the creative mood.

Shakespeare gives us life, moulded to a temperament, it is true, but

untrammelled by any other control, while Milton gives us life, still

moulded to a temperament, but also beyond that tested in some measure

by a morality that is intellectually fixed, and in seeking to justify

the ways of God--God being only another word for that morality--Milton

inevitably fails to justify humanity as Shakespeare so triumphantly

does. In imagination, and fertility, and rhetorical invention, and

constructive grandeur, and even in passionate realisation, Milton

cannot be placed below Shakespeare himself, but in understanding he

is below him, and this because he did not come to life with a mind so

open. By the time we have come from Milton to Pope the difference is

emphasised. Shakespeare created, and his creations carried their own

doom with them. Milton created, and his creations then had to be judged

by a morality that was held outside the terms of their own being,

as it were, and the integrity of the art was a little less exact in

consequence. But the morality was one in which Milton did passionately

believe; he would have gone to the stake for it, as many brave men did

go to the stake. Pope, too, had a moral belief by which the creations

of his poetry had to be judged, but there would have been no going to

the stake for Pope in its defence. The intellectual passion of Milton

had become an intellectual attitude in Pope, and, since men make far

more fuss about their attitudes than their passions, Pope allowed his

belief far more undisciplined play in his poetry than Milton had done.

Milton moralised like the prophets of old, but Pope moralised like a

modern schoolman. This is not to say that Pope in the process did not

often achieve very good poetry, and he sometimes touched truth more

profoundly, perhaps, than he knew. But when he tells us “whatever is is

right” we are sure that he is making an extremely effective verse while

we are not so sure that he is speaking out of his heart and not merely

playing up to the philosophic exercises of Bolingbroke.

With Wordsworth the difference persists, but it has shifted its

centre. His moral sincerity is no more in doubt than Milton’s, and,

indeed, his artistic control of moral judgment may be said to approach

Shakespeare’s more nearly than does Milton’s. Between Shakespeare

and Wordsworth, however, there still remains a great difference.

Wordsworth, although subject to abstract moral convictions much more

clearly than Shakespeare, is yet as unwilling as the great dramatist to

impose them on his creations after the event, but the difference lies

in the fact that with Wordsworth the whole substance of his creation is

far more limited in range than Shakespeare’s, and precisely because it

is from the first conditioned largely by the moral conviction. That is

to say that, without any deliberate manipulating of his art, Wordsworth

by instinct brought into his poetry only the kind of creations that

were not by their actual conduct, but in their essential character, in

keeping with his own moral nature. The creative impulse led Shakespeare

no one could tell from hour to hour in what direction, and it was

never hampered in its movement by the poet’s own moral point of view.

Milton’s impulse, also, could range far, but the issue, whatever it

might be, had to be tested by the same laws in the end. With Pope,

the administration of the laws had become a more or less arbitrary

ceremony, very self-important as such ceremonies are, and too often

divorced from the figures of any creative impulse at all. But with

Wordsworth the impulse never worked happily outside the influence of

the moral nature by which its creations were ultimately to be tried.

And so, leaving Pope out of the reckoning, since in these high matters,

memorable poet as he was, he was of altogether smaller stature, we may

say that in the fitness of the exercise of moral judgment Wordsworth

stands with Shakespeare, but that, his creation being governed largely

by a moral character already defined, instead of developing its own

moral influences as it grows, it is infinitely less various and complex

than Shakespeare’s, while Milton approaches Shakespeare more nearly in

range, but is less impressive than either in his adjustment of poetic

to moral values.

We find, then, that Shakespeare was profoundly interested in an immense

range of life and not at all in moral points of view, that Milton

was interested in a range of life still immense though less variously

peopled, and also passionately interested in moral points of view,

and that Wordsworth was as vitally concerned with a range of life far

more limited, the very nature of which, however, absolved him from

the necessity of consciously applying a moral point of view which had

already been allowed for by his art. In considering Tennyson’s position

in this matter we have to remember first that he was one of the very

few great English poets that have come to a very wide popularity in

their own time. Shakespeare was popular, so far as the records of

the theatre of his day tell us anything, but he was popular because

he told a good dramatic story on the stage and satisfied the needs

of theatre audiences. The moral grandeur with which he invested his

plays would in its absence no doubt have left them far less powerful

in their contemporary appeal, but it was not by this grandeur that

primarily he achieved his popularity. Milton was not popular in his

own lifetime at all, and Wordsworth, although he secured general fame

before his death, was never a voice for which the multitude waited.

Dryden and Pope had great reputations in their time, but it was rather

among an exclusive and small literary society than among the masses.

Byron caught the general ear by his gift of pure romantic narrative,

but he and Scott in their time were satisfying the demand for good

stories, which has since produced the immense crop of modern fiction.

But Tennyson was in a different case from all of these. Here was a poet

who was impressing, as no other poet in England had ever done before,

his moral and philosophic views upon all sorts and conditions of men,

and this without using the great circulating medium of the theatre or

beguiling with a tale. The time was not one of any deeper intellectual

or spiritual life than any other, but one in which that life was more

diverse in its interests. Whether the educational and scientific and

industrial developments that were going forward have been for good

or bad in the welfare of the community may be doubted, but there is

no question that they were stimulating the average mentality of the

country to a fresh activity. Religious and philosophic speculation,

the adjustment of scientific discovery to faith, the economics of

the new order, and the precise significance of the growing Imperial

idea, these and other questions were the daily concern of the man

in the street, and disputation was the common practice of nearly

every hearthside. Perplexity followed on perplexity, and they were

perplexities not only of private spiritual experience, but of public

passion also. And upon these Tennyson’s judgment was awaited with an

unparalleled eagerness. Apart from the interest in his poetic genius,

in the shaping power with which his art embodied his experience, there

was a far-reaching concern with the actual nature of his conclusions.

The poet was a prophet in the land, with an authority that he had not

known since the old bardic days. Queues would form at the bookshops

at the early hours of the morning on days when a new volume by him

was to be published. And this touching faith in a poet’s word was not

held only by the simple-minded and bewildered generality who wanted

readymade solutions for their problems. It was shared by working

men and the great leaders of science, by shrewd and liberal scholars

and by unlettered adolescents, by the country squire and the stump

orator, by Calvinistic churchmen and free-thinkers, by poets and the

new Utilitarians, by the Queen and the village pump, in short by all

sorts and conditions of men. When we remember how representative an

audience it was to which Tennyson spoke we need hardly do more than

this to realise that the charge that has sometimes been made against

him of intellectual shallowness or charlatanry is a very ill-considered

one. A religious or intellectual impostor may catch the easy ear of a

credulous public for a moment, pack revival halls, or become a best

seller, but a following that included Jowett and Huxley and Rossetti

and FitzGerald and Francis Palgrave and Butler of Trinity, Gladstone

and Disraeli, General Gordon and J. R. Green, George Eliot and Stopford

Brooke and Thackeray and Tindall, not only as exceptional but as

representative figures, was neither easy nor credulous, and when the

last word of caricature about Tennyson and his mantle has been said

the fact remains that in direct doctrine, as apart from the subtler

processes of poetry, he had an influence upon the finest minds of his

age which can hardly be exaggerated. He was an acknowledged as well as

an unacknowledged legislator.

This does not often happen to a poet, and, while we may be glad that

now and again the old office of poetry in the daily counsels of the

people should be renewed, it is well that in the general run of things

this should be so. Nothing is more likely to turn a poet’s head than

to be accepted as an oracle, and it must be allowed that it turned

Tennyson’s head a little. His was too fine a nature for the effects to

be very serious, and Mr. Nicolson is inclined to overstate the case

when he talks of Tennyson’s acumen in trimming his sails to every

fresh wind. The truth is that the business of poetry and of ordered

philosophy are distinct things, and while many of us think that in the

end poetry has the more persuasive voice of the two, as she certainly

has the more charming, it is not very good for her to be nattered

into the belief that she can use both at will. And Tennyson was so

flattered. The moral judgment, the function of which in Shakespeare’s

art, and Milton’s and Wordsworth’s, we have discussed, became with

Tennyson as independent a preoccupation as it had been with Pope, but

with Tennyson it was at once much more serious and much more sincere

and less witty in nature, and, in its divorcement from poetry, much

more dangerous in consequence of this. This is by no means to say

that Tennyson’s moral pieces are never good poetry or that they are

not very often durably convincing in their morality, but it is to say

that he would often impose upon his poetry a moral judgment that was

not a passionate one like Milton’s or a sententiously dialectical

one like Pope’s, but an almost official one held with all the

solemnity of official responsibility, and gathered as much from the

abstract public opinion to which he in turn ministered as from his

own brooding conviction. To say that Tennyson was dishonest in this

is to say something that should not be said about so rare a poet and

so single-hearted a man. It is not even as though the moral judgment

to which he committed himself was ever one of which he could not

quite sincerely say that he approved, and in further extenuation it

must be remembered that, after all the talk about the waste tissue in

Tennyson’s work which came from his concern in this way with ephemeral

moods and institutions, there is on actual examination very little of

his poetry which makes wholly unprofitable reading to-day. But the

trouble so far as it went was, it may be, that Tennyson was tempted

into confusing moral opinions about particular things with a presiding

moral judgment and to introduce these into a poetical context where

they had no proper place. Milton’s moral nature could assert itself

over and above his poetical creation, and in so far as that was so he

could be said to indulge a moral point of view in a way that made his

sense of artistic fitness a little less fine than Shakespeare’s. But

Tennyson went beyond this, and not only allowed moral points of view

sometimes to become the chief concern of poetry, in the manner of Pope,

though Tennyson did it far more impressively, but he was also capable

of allowing the pressure of moral points of view to lower the passion

of his poetic creation in a way that Milton never did.

So it is that that passage at the end of _Guinevere_ is fundamentally a

betrayal of the very beautiful poetic life into which it intrudes. The

moral point of view expressed is not only not inevitably Arthur’s, that

is to say, not an organic part of the poetry, it is not even a moral

judgment pronounced by the poet upon his creation at the bidding of a

vast natural impetus such as directed Milton in his judgments. Plainly

the passage is introduced because Tennyson remembers that these views

about conjugal fidelity are likely on the whole to be well received by

the great audience that is waiting for him. That they would, in fact,

be so received, that they were in keeping with responsible opinion in

the fabric of society, and that they are, however successfully they may

sometimes be challenged, a comfortable doctrine in the expediency of

our modern life with much to be said for it, that they are, in short,

moral views of some considerable authority, are not sufficient excuses

for Tennyson’s misapplication of them. The point is that, in a passage

such as that given, Tennyson was accepting a rule-of-thumb morality

from the social currency and not only passing it off as a moral

judgment welling up from the deeps of poetic creation, but deceiving

himself into the belief that it was this. It was, in effect, very much

the sort of thing that Pope had done, only Pope’s shrewd common sense

kept him nearer to the fundamentals of moral doctrine and saved him

from the false evangelical fervours that Tennyson was apt to catch from

the public congregations above which he was so popular a figure. A

congregation is, in fact, always a dangerous _venue_ for a poet, since

even a congregation of Jowetts and FitzGeralds cannot be wholly clear

of the demoralising atmosphere of the revivalist meeting. It comes

to this, that when Tennyson wrote that passage, although no doubt in

argument he would have hotly defended the position advanced, he did not

believe what he was saying with the full force of poetic conviction,

and in consequence he marred a poem in which, for the rest, is an

idyllic tenderness, set against an heroic background with perfect

imaginative mastery. And the chief defect in Tennyson’s poetry as a

whole may be found to be of this nature. The flaws in _In Memoriam_,

for example, one of the noblest elegiac poems in the language, nearly

all have this common origin. The defect is very nearly the sum of the

charge to be made again Tennyson’s poetry, and it leaves the great body

of his achievement but very little impoverished in character.

Chapter IV

_The Range of Subject Matter in Victorian Poetry--The

Occasional Element--Mrs. Browning--Christina

Rossetti--FitzGerald--Spiritual Ecstasy_

This element in the management of the poetic function, which sometimes

in Tennyson became a weakness, was one which left its traces upon the

volume of Victorian poetry as a whole. It was, indeed, not a sudden

phenomenon specifically of that age, since it had been gradually

asserting itself in English poetry for some generations, but it now

became for a considerable time an established part of the tradition.

That is to say, the interests of poetry generally, although it was

impossible for them to explore more deeply the fundamentals of human

nature than had been done in the past, had by now become far more

various in their operations than they had been. The great Victorian

poets could achieve no more of significant revelation than Shakespeare

and Milton and Wordsworth, but they did, as it happened, deal in their

poetry with a wider range of interests. The actual subjects chosen

by the Victorians for poetic treatment far exceeded in number the

subjects that had been so chosen in any age before. One might put it

crudely and say that Tennyson and Browning and Arnold, and some of the

others, wrote about every subject under the sun. Tennyson is reported

to have told a friend that he would have written the Ode in praise

of Wellington, with all its political and imperial preoccupations,

quite independently of the claims of his function as laureate. A

Colonial Exhibition, the latest step in the theory of evolution, the

progress of the feminist movement, a marriage in the royal family,

these things could move his emotions with hardly less authenticity

than the eternal exultations and desires that were for him, as they

had been immemorially, the subject matter of poetry. When we remember

what vast tracts of even that common ground had in different ages

been left almost wholly unexplored by poetry, we realise more fully

the catholicity of interest which now called it. The great age of

the Elizabethan lyric, for example, hardly touched the resources of

nature as material for poetry, while with the age of Pope love poetry

passed with the last artificialities of the later Carolines into

almost complete silence for a generation. And, again, for a period of

over a hundred years, between the death of Vaughan and the coming of

William Blake, the note of religious mysticism, with the exception of

Christopher Smart’s one ecstatic moment, almost goes out of English

poetry altogether. If, remembering these things, we then turn our minds

to the Victorians, and have a sense of their poetic mood, we at once

realise that it would have been almost inconceivable that any one of

them should have failed in the course of his usual practice to write a

great deal about all these things, nature and love and religion, and we

find, in fact, that each one of them did so. But in going beyond these

and kindred subjects, as they habitually did, to more specific and

local interests for their inspiration, they became, in a sense that no

group of masters had been before, occasional poets.

It was fortunate that they brought to their office as such the best of

their qualities, and did not reserve these alone for the inspirations

more accredited by tradition, so that occasional poetry, in the

Victorian age, very often became great poetry. In reading the poetry of

no other age do we so often feel that a poet of first-rate endowment

has, as it were, been hunting about for a subject. Occasional poetry

conceived and carried out in the great manner had hitherto been almost

wholly confined to personal addresses of compliment or condolence, and

fustian as these mostly were there had been very noble exceptions. But

with the Victorians the occasions were unconfined, and any one of the

poets might at any moment produce a memorable poem, as it seemed, upon

something that might catch his eye in the morning paper. If, by way of

illustration, we were to take the titles of a hundred of Donne’s poems

and set them beside the titles of a hundred of Browning’s, we should

find that in external range the one would be, as it were, a small green

isle and the other a very archipelago. I need not labour the point that

this does not at all suggest that Browning was a greater poet than

Donne; it merely emphasises the fact that Browning’s age was far less

concentrated in its poetic attentions than was Donne’s. The result of

which was that Victorian poetry, with all its great central merits,

all its loyal assertation of the eternal elements, acquired a certain

scattered character, a certain disorder in bulk, that leaves the

essential spirit of this age a little more than commonly difficult to

come at.

A further result was that a good deal of Victorian work is of a

lowered significance when set beside work of corresponding eminence

in other ages. The moments of artistic surrender such as we find

playing havoc with Tennyson’s poetry in such a passage as that given by

_Guinevere_ were not uncommon in the work of the age, though they

often came in another and less disastrous aspect. The arbitrariness

that so often governed--or left ungoverned--the Victorian choice of

subject, could not but sometimes bring about a relation of something

less than the highest imaginative urgency between the poet and the

occasion of his verse. In the general run of poetic practice this

did not necessarily mean an entire failure of the spirit nor a total

absence of enchantment, but it did more often than not make the

thing created seem to be less inevitably an addition to the riches

of English poetry. A great deal of the work of so admirable a poet

as Mrs. Browning, for example, is heavily marked by this condition.

Setting aside her obvious but unimportant technical deficiencies, we

find in reading one long piece of hers after another that it “hath all

the good gifts of nature” except indisputable evidence of its original

necessity. A poem such as _An Island_ sparkles with tender and

expressive imagery--

For all this island’s creature-full

(Kept happy not by halves),

Mild cows that at the vine-wreaths pull,

Then low back at their calves

With tender lowings, to approve

The warm mouths milking them for love.

Free gamesome horses, antelopes,

And harmless leaping leopards,

And buffaloes upon the slopes,

And sheep unruled by shepherds;

Hares, lizards, hedgehogs, badgers, mice,

Snakes, squirrels, frogs, and butterflies.

And birds that live there in a crowd,

Horned owls, rapt nightingales,

Larks bold with heaven, and peacocks proud,

Self-sphered in those grand tails;

All creatures glad and safe, I deem.

No guns nor springes in my dream!

And yet the whole has something of the character of a despatch from

a divinely gifted special correspondent. And the same thing may be

said sometimes even of so spiritually immaculate a writer as Christina

Rossetti. _Goblin Market_ is a masterpiece, conceived out of a

lovely nature and flawlessly executed, but if our minds go from it

to Drayton or Herrick, with whom it has some affinity, we are aware

not of a surer touch in the older poets but of a stricter visitation.

_Under the Rose_, a triumph of delicately controlled power, has,

very elusively here, the same suggestion of something occasional in

its character. Perhaps the most notable instance of all is Edward

FitzGerald’s _Rubaiyat_,[20] and here we are on delicate ground,

since we are speaking of not only one of the most celebrated poems

of the age, but of one of the most remarkable. At first thought it

might seem that of no poet could it less justifiably be said that in

his principal lifework he was allowing any occasional or even any

external influence to play upon his creative mood. Fastidious in

judgment, of lonely intellectual pursuits, having not the slightest

regard for contemporary fame, indolent rather than eager in creation

and, far from seeking occasion for poetry, relieved when he could pass

it by, as he generally could, and wholly unconscious of anything like

a mission, FitzGerald might well have been the last poet in whom to

look for the accidental quality of which we are speaking. And yet it

is this accidental quality that keeps his _Rubaiyat_, so rich in

memorable excellence, so splendidly contrived and so often universal

in its nature, from being among the very greatest moral poems in the

language. The circumstance that it took its form from FitzGerald’s

Oriental studies and is Persian in its machinery is of no consequence;

Shakespeare was equally Shakespeare in the Roman world and mediæval

legend and his modern England, and as much might be said for Morris

in FitzGerald’s own time. Here was a poem that was essentially

religious in character--that its doctrine was one of agnostic hedonism

notwithstanding. For such a poem to come to the highest achievement

possible to its kind, the first indispensable condition is an

uncompromising faith, and this is what Fitzgerald had not even in his

own _dolce far niente_. There had once in English poetry been an

age of faith, and there had once been an age of reason, but FitzGerald

was of an age in which faith and reason were, in the life of the

nation, for the moment inextricably confused, and when poetry addressed

itself to rhapsodical belief--or unbelief if you will--as it did in the

_Rubaiyat_, the seductions of reason were ever-present and the

fervour of confession was embarrassed by the insinuations of argument.

This did not much matter in _In Memoriam_ or in the great part of

Browning’s work that was religious in texture, because here speculation

was, for good or ill, very largely the explicit province of the poetry.

But FitzGerald’s design was not speculation, it was disclosure, and

when this is so poetry should breathe the spirit of the labourer

addressing his wife, “I’m not arguin’, I’m a-tellin’ of yer.” If the

reader should think it worth while, for comparative purposes, to turn

up a forgotten but splendid poem, _Memorials of Mortality_, by

Joshua Sylvester,[21] he will find an admirable example of faith in

somewhat lugubrious but trumpet-toned poetic assertion. There is no

arguing in Sylvester, it is all rhetorical and solemn revelation,

wholly indifferent to its audience and unconscious of the possibility

of denial. With FitzGerald there is an undertone always of anxiety to

carry opinion with him, very indefinite in expression and yet present

clearly enough if our attention is close. We do not complain about

it; to do so would be at once foolish and ungenerous. But we are

aware of it and we know that it is in some subtle way, and perhaps

unconsciously, a concession to a mood of the time, which, as we have

seen, was a little antagonistic to the most commanding kind of poetic

fulfilment. When we read--

’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days

Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:

Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,

And one by one back in the Closet lays.

The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes,

But Right or Left as strikes the Player goes;

And He that toss’d Thee down into the Field,

_He_ knows about it all--He knows--HE knows!

we cannot but admire the masterly, indeed the unforgettable way in

which the philosophic position is set forth, nor can we deny that

the statement is fairly within the terms of poetry. But in such

notes as this, which are frequent in the _Rubaiyat_, we detect a

certain faltering in imaginative faith, not precisely in intellectual

conviction about the creed which is being expounded, but in the

spiritual exaltation that may lift any creed, whether it be sacramental

and beatific as in Crashaw’s _St. Theresa_, or stoic as in Emily

Brontë’s _Last Lines_, or inscrutably naturalistic as in Mr. Ralph

Hodgson’s _Song of Honour_, above the regions of debate to the very

pinnacle of authority. When all these reservations have been made,

there is enough virtue and to spare in Victorian poetry to leave it

written as a new and glorious chapter in the most national of our arts,

nor can spiritual ecstasy itself be wholly denied it, as _Dost Thou Not

Care?_ and many other poems by Christina Rossetti, Tennyson’s _Crossing

the Bar_, Browning’s _Prospice_, and, dark though its conclusions be,

Arnold’s _Dover Beach_, and Mrs. Browning’s _Weeping Saviour_, and

Coventry Patmore’s _Vesica Piscis_, to name half a dozen poems at a

venture, can testify. But, considering the manifestations of poetry in

that age as a whole, spiritual ecstasy was one of its least constant

achievements.

Chapter V

_Love Poetry and the Victorian Use of Nature_

In nothing did the Victorian genius justify itself more fully than in

its love poetry. Love, a theme which, apart from the Augustan silence

which was broken only by such stray productions as James Hammond’s

_Love Elegies_, has been constant in English lyric poetry, had

never before been sung at one time with so many individual accents.

In the poetry of speculative thought and religion the Victorian

disintegration of mind may have led to a certain fluttered insecurity,

a lack of the superb moral poise which distinguishes the Greek and

the Miltonic epochs for example, when, no matter how individual the

poet, the rules as to what was and what was not the proper material

of poetry had some authority. It was not insignificant that whereas

Browning, we feel, could pick up the subject for a long philosophic

poem in a morning’s walk, Milton took twenty years to deliberate his

choice. But in love poetry the advantage, by the same conditions, was

with the Victorians. The law about the matter would seem to have a

strange streak of paradox in its nature. To take speculative religion

and love as contrasting themes by way of illustration, it would appear

that since speculative religion is a thing about which at no time can

there be any sort of standard or finality in the human mind, it is

on the whole better for the purposes of art that some such standard

arbitrarily fixed should be commonly accepted. On the other hand, since

love is a thing about which in its actual nature there is little or

no change from age to age as between one man and another, it profits

art when individual interpretations of love are as wide as possible

in their variety. The Greek drama, the high noon of Italian painting,

the seventeenth-century devotional school of English lyric, all these

gained enormously in impressiveness because in the creation of each of

them there was present to every artist a more or less fixed central

authority which he recognised as being greater than any he could set up

by his own unaided meditation. But in love the individual’s authority

is as great as any common authority can be, since love itself, as apart

from thought about love, is the same in its essential nature, whatever

measure of that nature may be given, to one man as to another, and

so there is gain when that thought about love, as distinguished from

love itself, is allowed the utmost freedom; and in this freedom the

Victorian age in poetry is more personal than any that had preceded it.

If we consider love poetry as a whole we shall find but an extremely

small part of it is concerned with the fundamental ecstasy of love

itself, with the adoration of the lover for the beloved in terms of

ordinary experience and not modified by special circumstance as it was,

for example, with Dante, and when it is so concerned it necessarily

changes hardly at all except in verbal idiom from age to age. Love

poetry, for the most part, is concerned not with love itself but with

the lover’s attitude towards and contemplation of his love, in fact,

not with love so much as with thought about love. And this thought

about love from age to age had in poetry been largely governed by a

common attitude prevalent at the time. Shakespeare’s _Sonnets_,

and a few individual lyrics by other men, are so well known to every

reader of poetry that it is difficult to say how readily we could

distinguish them without their familiarity, but beyond these it is safe

to say of the great body of Elizabethan love lyric, with all its superb

singing quality and varied command of imagery, that we could never with

any certainty tell one poet from another by the nature of his attitude

towards his subject. And so in a later age, although we may find one

fashion contending with another, the respective sides are governed by

their own rules and there is no reason why the poet who wrote “Tell me

not, sweet, I am unkind” should not also have written “Ask me no more

where Job bestows,” or, on the other hand, why the poet who wrote

Shall I wasting in despair

Die because a woman’s fair....

should not also have written

Out upon it! I have lov’d

Three whole days together....

With the return of love as a theme to English poetry in the Romantic

Revival, there was for a time no very decided movement either towards a

general character or away from it. Wordsworth dealt with the subjective

love emotion but very rarely, it inspired but a few verses of Keats’s

best work, Byron’s poetic rank would have been very little affected

if, with the exception of two or three stanzas, he had not used the

theme at all, and, apart from Shelley, Landor is the only other poet

who contributed any considerable love poetry to an age which was mostly

concerned in other directions. Shelley’s great and personal love poetry

stands by itself in its time, as did Donne’s at an earlier period.

But, generally speaking, it may be said that in each age before the

Victorians when love poetry had been a common practice in English

verse it had been marked always by reference to some general attitude,

with the result that although it had never been deficient in lyric

beauty it had been, apart from individual exceptions like Donne and

Shelley, definitely limited in its psychological interest. With the

Victorians, however, the most striking thing in this matter is that

every poet of any consequence wrote love poetry and wrote a good deal

of it, and it is never possible for a moment to confuse the love poetry

of one with that of any other. The specific nature of each poet’s

individual contribution could only be attempted in separate studies

in detail of those poets and cannot be analysed in this brief study

of general characteristics. But to read Tennyson’s _Maud_, Browning’s

_Last Ride Together_, _A Woman’s Last Word_, _A Pretty Woman_, and

_The Lost Mistress_, to choose four of his representative love poems,

Rossetti’s _House of Life_, and Mrs. Browning’s _Sonnets from the

Portuguese_, Patmore’s _Unknown Eros_, and Swinburne’s _Dolores_, is

to pass through a succession of moods as different as they can well be

in character and having nothing in common save that their attention

is turned to one centre. And there is no likelihood of time slowly

investing this heterogeneous body of poetry with a common character

as it has done with the love poetry of past epochs. No formula can

ever be invented that shall include the social conscience and romantic

tenderness of _Maud_, Browning’s passionate but ruthless psychological

subtlety, Rossetti’s entranced voluptuousness, the proud surrender of

the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, Patmore’s transfigured worldliness

and Swinburne’s enraptured embodiment of an abstract passion in a

substantial image. In Victorian love poetry there is no dominant figure

but that of love itself, but the theme is celebrated with an orchestral

fullness that had never before been attained.

Coming, as they did, after Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats, it cannot

perhaps be claimed for the Victorian poets that they added notably to

the spiritual revelation of nature, but it can be said in their praise

that they were nearly all of them endowed with a very graphic gift of

exact observation of the natural world. Victorian poetry is alight with

phrases in which a natural mood or object is set down with the most

tender and vivid precision. Tennyson’s planet of Love,

Beginning to faint in the light that she loves

On a bed of daffodil sky....

Mrs. Browning’s delicate landscape where

sheep are cropping

The slant grass and daisies pale,

And five apple trees stand dropping

Separate shadows toward the vale....

FitzGerald’s

strip of herbage strown

That just outside divides the desert from the sown....

Christina Rossetti’s image, as telling as one of Marvell’s, of the

Green nest full of pleasant shade,

Wherein three speckled eggs were laid....

Browning’s “pear hung basking over a wall,” Arnold’s

Have I not pass’d thee on the wooden bridge

Wrapt in thy cloak and battling with the snow,

Thy face towards Hinksey and its wintry ridge....

Patmore’s

The buried bulb does know

The signals of the year,

And hails far summer with his lifted spear....

Morris’s

I know a little garden close

Set thick with lily and red rose....

and Rossetti’s “ground-whirl of the perished leaves of hope,” such

things can be matched on almost any page of any considerable poet

of the time. The age may have been not very much concerned with the

interpretation of nature in Wordsworth’s prophetic sense, but the easy

mastery over such images as those just given gave to the poetry of the

time a common background of rich and varied natural beauty, very bright

in line and colour.

Chapter VI

_Conclusion_

Nothing is vainer than for criticism of poetry to suppose that it

can give anything of the pleasure to be found in poetry itself. In

making these notes about Victorian poetry, and in reading over again

the work of the masters who wrote it, I am acutely aware how dismally

inadequate any commentary upon such work must be. I am aware, also,

that one could confront every generalisation that one makes with some

modifying example; I have, for instance, since saying what I did

about the love poetry of by-gone ages, been haunted by Bishop King’s

exquisitely personal and touching _Exequy_ on his “dead saint.”

But these exercises have their times, and they are at least an occasion

for refreshing memories that are apt to become a little dulled even

for the most loyal and industrious of us. Further, abstract theorising

about art at least does the art no harm and may sometimes serve it.

No one is likely to read the _Morte d’Arthur_ or the _Garden

of Proserpine_ or the _Scholar Gipsy_ or _Pippa Passes_

with any more poetic delight for anything that he may find in this

essay, but here and there a friendly mind may get a little pleasure of

a real though less essential kind in considering for a moment, apart

from the fundamental things of poetry that persist from one generation

to another, what were the characteristics that distinguished an age,

of which these are representative creations, from the other ages with

which it has now taken an equal and immortal place.

INDEX

A

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 19

Arnold, Matthew, 20, 21, 31, 32, 55, 66, 102, 109–114, 121–125,

134, 149, 151, 173, 210, 220, 228

Aytoun, William Edmondstoune, 169

B

Beardsley, Aubrey, 143

Blake, William, 23, 24, 31, 211

Bottomley, Gordon, 20

Bridges, Robert, 107

Brontë, Emily, 219

Brooke, Stopford, 202

Brown, T. E., 143, 146

Browne, Thomas, 114

Browning, Robert, 22, 32, 55, 92–103, 109, 114–117, 119, 142–147,

153, 156, 173, 210, 212, 217, 220, 226, 228

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 22, 214, 220, 226, 227

Bunyan, John, 165

Burbage, Richard, 64

Burns, Robert, 49

Butler, Dr. (of Trinity), 202

Byron, Lord, 22, 26, 49, 54, 64, 77, 94, 96, 125, 200, 225

C

Chapman, George, 51

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 35–37, 41, 56–59, 72, 74, 126, 131, 167, 170–173

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 104, 107

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 52

Collins, William, 23, 24, 44

Cory, William, 105

Crashaw, Richard, 17, 41, 219

D

Dante, Alighieri, 223

Davies, W. H., 19

Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, 202

Dixon, Richard Watson, 106, 107

Domett, Alfred, 143, 145

Donne, John, 17, 31, 38, 78, 114, 212, 225

Dowson, Ernest, 143

Drayton, Michael, 215

Dryden, John, 17, 200

E

Eliot, George, 202

F

FitzGerald, Edward, 202, 207, 215–219, 228

G

Galsworthy, John, 66

Gibson, Wilfred Wilson, 19

Gladstone, W. E., 202

Gordon, General, 202

Gosse, Edmund, 182

Gray, Thomas, 23, 24, 43, 47, 110, 112

Green, J. R., 202

Green, Matthew, 46

H

Hammond, James, 221

Hardy, Thomas, 30

Herbert, George, 41

Herrick, Robert, 17–20, 78, 215

Hodgson, Ralph, 219

Homer, 160, 174

Horne, Richard Hengist, 143

Housman, A. E., 19

Huxley, Professor, 202

J

Jago, Richard, 44

Jonson, Ben, 31, 66

Jowett, Benjamin, 202, 207

K

Keats, John, 22, 25, 31, 51, 54, 63, 77, 89, 94, 114, 125, 138,

225, 227

Kendon, Frank, 30

King, Henry, 17, 230

L

Landor, Walter Savage, 22, 53, 225

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 114

Lovelace, Richard, 17, 31, 38

M

Macaulay, Lord, 167, 172

Malory, 178, 184

Mare, Walter de la, 19, 28

Marlowe, Christopher, 51

Marsh, Edward, 18

Marvell, Andrew, 122, 139, 228

Masefield, John, 19, 163

Meynell, Alice, 19, 150, 151

Milton, John, 18, 20, 33, 38, 69, 77, 94, 110, 112, 118, 125, 137,

160, 194–199, 204, 210, 221

Morris, William, 22, 29, 55, 125, 128–134, 142, 149, 169–173, 217,

229

Murray, Gilbert, 105

N

Nicolson, Harold, 161, 203

P

Palgrave, Francis, 202

Patmore, Coventry, 148–154, 220, 226–228

Poe, Edgar Allan, 114

Pope, Alexander, 23, 25, 41, 45, 77, 195–198, 200, 204–207, 211

R

Roden, Noel, 105

Rossetti, Christina, 22, 55, 215, 220, 228

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 22, 55, 91, 125–129, 133, 202, 226–229

S

Saintsbury, Professor, 110, 125

Scott, Sir Walter, 166, 167, 172, 200

Shakespeare, William, 37, 58–66, 68, 77, 122, 137, 159, 174, 187,

191–198, 204, 205, 210, 216, 224

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 22, 25, 31, 50, 55, 125, 159, 187, 225–227

Smart, Christopher, 211

Spenser, Edmund, 51, 125

Suckling, Sir John, 31

Swinburne, Algernon C., 20–22, 28, 55, 125, 134–141, 149, 173, 186,

226, 227

Sylvester, Joshua, 218

T

Tabley, Lord de, 91, 106, 107

Taylor, Jeremy, 113

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 22, 30, 55, 57, 62, 66, 71–95, 102,

106–114, 125, 133–138, 142, 144, 149, 153, 156, 161–163, 173,

176–192, 199–210, 213, 220, 226

Tennyson, Frederick, 104

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 202

Thompson, Francis, 150

Tindall, Professor, 202

V

Vaughan, Henry, 17, 31, 40, 114, 139, 211

Vere, Aubrey de, 104, 114, 123

W

Walker, Professor Hugh, 169

Walton, Izaak, 114

Watson, Sir William, 120

Webster, John, 31

Whitman, Walt, 33

Wordsworth, William, 22–24, 30, 46–49, 52, 62, 78, 111, 112, 119,

125, 138, 166, 196–199, 210, 225, 227, 229.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The sifting of the minor poetic writers of the eighteenth century

is a task to which critical attention is now being very profitably

turned. Many readers of poetry no doubt associate Richard Jago and

Matthew Green, for example, in their minds as belonging to the same

negligible group, whereas Jago was a poor dull fellow in verse and

Green a very considerable poet indeed.

[2] That is to say, Chaucer’s language as intelligible to us. Lost in

it, no doubt, are associations from earlier speech.

[3] These remarks, it need hardly be added, apply to part of Byron’s

work only.

[4] This is not to deny the quality to every poet before Tennyson,

obviously. But never before had it been so salient a characteristic of

a poetic style, nor has it been since.

[5] Let me repeat that this is for immediate purposes of definition

only. Browning’s individual mark is clear enough upon his poetry right

through.

[6] Frederick Tennyson.

[7] Aubrey de Vere (the younger).

[8] Arthur Hugh Clough. Tennyson would have avoided the repeated rhyme

sounds of the first and second stanzas, and the third, given here for

the sense, is below standard.

[9] _Heraclitus_, by William Cory. Cory (Johnson by birth) was

a very occasional poet, but when he wrote like this Tennyson himself

could have done it no better, although no less an authority than

Professor Gilbert Murray, in an instructive paper on verse translation,

has recently complained, quite unaccountably as it seems to me, that

the poem fails by reason of triviality in diction and rhythm.

[10] Richard Watson Dixon.

[11] Roden Noel.

[12] Lord de Tabley.

[13] I have not in general much use for criticism that quotes other

criticism, but at this time of day any one may steal from the stores

of Professor Saintsbury’s learning and wisdom, and although there is

no modern critic, perhaps, so provocative as he, there is none who has

left his mark so indelibly upon every subsequent judgment of English

poetry.

[14] Each reader may have his quarrel with my instances. But they

served an argument that seemed worth pursuing.

[15] This, I need not say, is a very partial definition of a decade

that was not exclusively represented by the sallow genius of an Ernest

Dowson and an Aubrey Beardsley.

[16] Mr. Harold Nicolson’s recently published book on Tennyson

illustrates my point. The book is an acute and, in nearly every

respect, a sympathetic piece of thinking, but it is coloured by the

circumstance, due to the reaction of which I have spoken, that Mr.

Nicolson often thinks Tennyson intellectually very little apples. And

in this respect--in this respect alone--he patronises Tennyson, and

the result is unfortunate, not for Tennyson but for Mr. Nicolson. It

really will not do to say that Tennyson was an exquisite lyric poet but

a blundering old prig intellectually. Tennyson’s intellectual approach

and expression were not Mr. Nicolson’s, and it is perfectly right for

Mr. Nicolson to stand for his own. But he should have remembered that

Tennyson was not only the lyrist that he admits him to be, but, when

all is said and done, a giant among the minds of a remarkable age.

Had he done this he would not have marred what is otherwise a very

beautiful piece of critical exposition.

[17] It is unnecessary here to discuss the claim that would place

_Sigurd_ in the region of epic.

[18] It is interesting to hear that the dealers are anticipating

the moment when such things will become criterions of taste for the

dilettante. Warehouses are being stocked for the new demand that may

arise at any moment for rooms adorned by horsehair furniture.

[19] That is to say, by causing a reaction that supposes it to be

outside poetry’s function to have any moral purpose whatever.

[20] I speak of this poem as though it were FitzGerald’s original

composition, without reference to Omar, which for essential purposes it

is.

[21] 1563–1618, the translator of du Bartas, and a prolific poet known

to most readers by one lovely sonnet, but otherwise neglected far

beyond his desert.