It is true that now and again a poet even to-day may contrive charming variations upon stanzaic form, as Tennyson did in his Recollections of the Arabian Nights, or as Mr. Thomas Hardy has done more recently in many of his lyrics. Every now and again also a poet may invent some attractive little device of his own in the smaller things of technique, as, for example, Mr. Frank Kendon, a new poet who makes an interesting experiment with rhyme-sounds thus—musing, mind, attuned, despising. But there is no particular virtue in these gestures once their novelty has passed, and the fact remains that from the coming of Wordsworth until all our best contemporary poets, by far the greater part of the most original work, and important work, has been done in recognised verse forms, and it has relied for its personal accent upon an individual rhythmic beat within those forms. The domination of the rhymed heroic couplet in the age preceding Wordsworth was so complete as to make the return to other more definitely lyric measures almost a feat of invention, but, even so, it is doubtful whether there is any verse form used by Wordsworth or Blake or Shelley or Keats, or any of their contemporaries, which could not in its essential character be matched somewhere in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.
In its structural foundations, therefore, Victorian verse in England may be said to be a direct inheritance from the Romantic age, and through it from the longer general ancestry of English poetry. The body of fine work done between Victoria’s succession and the death of Tennyson is sufficient proof that the poetic instinct of the race knew very well what it was about in this. At the same time, the more restless talents were sometimes troubled by allegiance to forms that, whatever their virtue, had no longer the first flush of inventive delight. The sombre, charnel-house genius of a Webster, the rugged, almost fierce, intellectual power of a Ben Jonson, the religious ecstasy of a Vaughan, the tender irresponsibility of a Lovelace or a Suckling, and the spiritual ingenuity of a Donne, were all alike content to work in the simplest lyric forms, and were able to find complete expression through these, because as forms they were still fresh enough to be for each man treasure-trove. Nowhere in the whole range of passion and wit and subtle argument was there a mood to be found that wanted at any time to break the mould. To a large extent this has remained true until our own day, but as time has gone on a poet has now and again suddenly, as it were, become too conscious of the long service already done by the more established measures and has been tempted into irregularities which have sometimes been admirable in result and have sometimes tumbled over into excesses only to be forgotten. A great deal of Browning’s verse is the result of some such uneasiness in his mind, a fear lest he should accept tradition too easily, a deliberate realisation on his part that a poet has to be original. Browning’s genius could stand the strain, but a strain it was. Matthew Arnold’s experiments in free verse have much the same origin. He, again, justified himself, but without doing anything to show that the main traditions in which he worked habitually were becoming less important to English poetry. In the case of Whitman, the one example in the Victorian age of a great poetic genius working consistently without respect for the established practice of English verse, there is no doubt that to minds and ears aware of all that custom has achieved, a great energy denied itself more than half its effect.
Whitman’s revolt was complete, and, broadly speaking, it has had no effect upon English poetry. Arnold’s departures from established practice were occasional and, even so, pretty much in the example of Milton, who himself made but few experiments, and those not violent departures from the establishment. Browning’s nonconformity was another matter. Unlike Whitman, he remained essentially always within the tradition, but his unrest within the tradition was more or less constant and not, as with Arnold, the accident of a mood here and there. Browning’s was the most important poetic revolt of his age, and it is a revolt that is a matter of diction more precisely than of metrical form. And in its manner, as distinguished from its content, it is in diction that the Victorian age most importantly modified tradition. Leaving Whitman out of the question, the Victorian use of verse was, as we have seen, with one or two insignificant exceptions, an acknowledgment of the fitness of all that had been done by the age-long instinct of the race. Nor, taking the Victorian achievement as a whole, shall we find any violent or general change in the management of diction itself. But practice here was to some extent modified, and chiefly by Browning and through his influence.
The history of diction in English poetry is one that has never been written, and one that would need a great volume of argument and illustration. But taking a summary view of the whole field certain characteristics define themselves from age to age. The first generalisation that may be made about good diction in poetry is that it should derive from the common speech of the time and yet be a heightened idiomatic form of that speech, achieving from the emotional pressure of poetry a new dignity and beauty. And we shall find that in English poetry the diction has always associated itself in this way with the natural speech of the time. Chaucer, in taking English speech, and for the first time making it the language of English literature, was dealing, so far as we can reconstruct the facts of that far-off time, with a language unsophisticated, unlearned, and quite ingenuous in its sincerity. And the language of his poetry is marked by these qualities, quickened by the breath of the poet’s genius.
Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth