The Country’s best, its accent hit,
And partly sound its Polity.
Chapter VIII
Conclusion of Part I
In the scheme of the present study no more need be said of the technical side of Victorian poetry, nor need anything at all be said of such specific matters of technique as rhyme, syllabic equivalence, stanzaic structure, or prosodic abstractions, beyond to remark that in all these things, although there is an infinite variety of practice, the Victorian age added little that was essential to the history of English poetry. Perhaps, indeed, it was inevitable, and in no wise to be regretted, that it should add nothing. Further, to examine the rhythmic achievement of the age would be to examine at length the work of each individual poet, even to present a complete edition of each individual poet’s works, since the rhythmic life of each poet is at once as individual and as incalculable as are the gait and gesture of a man. It has been my purpose, rather, to consider the many tendencies that display themselves in the diction of Victorian poetry, since in and through these can be most clearly marked the distinguishing characteristics of any poetic age. In doing this I have necessarily sometimes foreshadowed what there will be to say in the later part of this study, where the content matter of Victorian poetry will be considered, and where some poets will be dealt with whom it did not seem necessary to mention at this earlier stage of the argument. What cannot be told of the technical characteristics of Victorian poetry from the examples of Tennyson and Browning and those other poets that we have considered cannot be told at all.
Part II: THE MATERIAL OF VICTORIAN POETRY
Chapter I
Intellectual Fashions
Nothing is easier than for one age to be shallow and arrogant about the spiritual and intellectual preoccupation of another. To active minds, even the most cynical among them, life is such an urgent and absorbing business, so desperately charged with significance, that it is easy enough to suppose that contemporary methods of approach to it are the only wisely chosen ones, and this particularly in contrast with those of an immediately preceding age. I do not know that any critic of to-day thinks that Homer was a liar or a fool because he believed, or professed to believe, in the hierarchy of Zeus and the enchantment of the Sirens, or complains that Shakespeare was a credulous ghostmonger, or that Shelley, in holding that the world could be satisfactorily governed by a quixotic political idealism, was only a little less inept than Machiavelli, who thought that it could be redeemed by political craft. We find no difficulty in accepting Homer and Shakespeare (who, by the way, is just as likely to have actually believed in the appearance of ghosts as not, and who made fairies real, when most modern writers can do nothing but make them silly) on their own terms in their relation to life. If we understand the functions of poetry we are not the less moved by Milton’s description of the creation of the world because we no longer believe that it happened in that way, and I suppose there would be none among us found with temerity enough to suggest that Milton himself did not believe it and that he was setting his story down idly without conviction. In all these instances we are willing to admit that it is not the creed that matters, but the faith and passion with which it is held, and we will allow the poets any conclusions they like so long as we are persuaded of their own imaginative good faith. And yet this generosity is not always found when the conclusions happen to be those of an age against which our own lives are partly passed in reaction, and many honest critics who would call Homer neither liar nor fool are misled into calling Tennyson both.
Among Victorian poets Tennyson is at the centre of a philosophic life against which the intellectual habit of our own time is often in active opposition. This being so, much may be excused to the excesses of self-interest, and we can make some allowance, for example, for a current mood that thinks it rather indelicate to speak about mere goodness, when it reprimands a mood of yesterday that thought goodness a very simple and natural thing to talk about. But to make allowances for it is not to approve it, and it is about time for us to stop making ourselves ridiculous by talking about the great Victorians as though they were lost in a fog of superstition and prudery and moral timidity.[16] We need not debase ourselves before them, but, also, we need not talk as though the dawn of intellectual candour had broken somewhere about 1900. It is all really such a little matter, the difference, just a change of deportment, that is all. At many modern tables, if you should speak of goodness everybody blushes or simpers, if, indeed, there is not some very bold spirit to rebuke you openly. But if you speak of the other thing every one is happily at ease and you realise how fearlessly we to-day are facing the truth about life. At our grandmothers’ table it was different. The freedom of to-day would have caused consternation there, but our own inhibitions would have been unintelligible. There have been loss and gain in both ways, and the balance remains about the same. After all, it is just as unaccountable to be discomposed by Tennyson when he makes Galahad say
My strength is as the strength of ten
Because my heart is pure....