Victorian Poetry

by John Drinkwater

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.