Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

Thus it happens that Tennyson voices the feelings of an immense class of cultured people, who have gone through the century in the same ambling fashion, a prey to its fears, intellectual enough to see the truths of science, but not spiritual enough to see the import of the dawn of the new day.

Tennyson, then, quite of and in his time, would desire above all things to appeal to it as it appealed to him. He waxes enthusiastic over conventional politics, he treats his social problems so entirely in accordance with the conventions of the day that they are not problems at all, and he is quite in love with the beauty of aristocratic society, though he occasionally descends to the people for a subject. These are all entirely sufficient reasons for his popularity as a poet during his life, further emphasized by the added fact that having no subject matter (that is thought-content) wherewith to startle the world by strangeness, he took the wiser part of delighting them with his exquisite music.

Though so satisfactory a representative of his times, he did outrage one of the shibboleths of the critics in his efforts to find a new and richer music than poets had before used by bringing scientific imagery into his verse. Of all the absurd controversies indulged in by critics, the most absurd is that fought out around the contention that science and poetry cannot be made to harmonize. Wordsworth was keen enough to see this before the rest of the world and prophesied in the preface to his “Lyrical Ballads” that science would one day become the closest of allies to poetry, and Tennyson was brilliant enough to seize the new possibilities in scientific language with a realization that nature imagery might almost be made over by the use in describing it of scientific epithets. A famous illustration of the happy effects he produced by these means is in the lines “Move eastward happy Earth and round again to-night.” His observation of Nature, moreover, had a scientific accuracy, which made possible far more delicate and individual descriptions of Nature’s aspects than had been produced before. It was also a happy thought for him to weave so much of his poetry around the Arthurian legends. Beautiful in themselves, they came nearer home than classical or Italian legends, and, when made symbolic of an ideal which must appeal to the heart of every cultured Englishman, who regarded himself as a sort of prototype of the blameless King Arthur, and whose grief at the failure of the social fabric planned by him would be as poignant as that of the King himself, they carried with them a romantic and irresistible attraction.

The reasons why Tennyson should appeal especially to the nineteenth century cultured and highly respectable Englishman far outweighed any criticisms that might be made by critics on his departure from poetic customs of the past. He pleased the highest powers in the land, became Laureate and later Lord Tennyson. He will therefore always remain the poet most thoroughly representative of that especial sort of beauty belonging to a social order which has reached a climax of refinement and intelligence, but which, through its very self-satisfaction, cuts itself off from a perception of the true value of the new forces coming into play in the on-rushing stream of social development.

The other poets who divide with Browning and Tennyson the highest honors of the Victorian Era are Landor, Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, Mrs. Browning, George Meredith.

Landor and Arnold preserved more than any of the others a genuine classical aroma in their verse, and on this account have always been delighted in by a few. After all, the people may not immediately accept a poet of too great independence, but they are least of all likely to grow enthusiastic over anything reactionary either in style or thought. Romantic elements of not too startling a character win the favor of most readers.

Though classic in style both these poets reflected phases of the century’s thought. Landor differed from Browning in the fact that he frequently expressed himself vigorously upon the subject of current politics. His political principles were not of the most advanced type, however. He believed in the notion of a free society, but seems to have thought the best way of attaining it would be a commonwealth in which the wise should rule, and see that the interests of all should be secured. Still his insistence upon liberty, however old-fashioned his ideas of the means by which it should be maintained, puts him in the line of the democratic march of the century.

Swinburne calls him his master, and represents himself in verse as having learned many wise and gracious things of him, but his thought was not sufficiently progressive to triumph over the classicism of his style in an age of romantic poetry, though there will always be those who hold on to the shibboleth that, after all, the classic is the real thing in poetry, never realizing that where the romantic is old enough, it, too, becomes classic.

Matthew Arnold stands in poetry where men like Huxley and Clifford stood in science, who, Childe-Roland like, came to the dark tower, calmly put the slug horn to their lips and blew a blast of courage. Science had undermined their belief in a future life as well as destroying the revealed basis of moral action. In such a man the intellectual nature overbalances the intuitional, and when inherited belief based on authority is destroyed, there is nothing but the habit of morality left.

Arnold has had the sympathy of those who could no longer believe in their revealed religion, but who loved it and regretted its passing away from them. He gives expression to this feeling in lines like these: