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....