Victorian Poetry

by John Drinkwater

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.