“This problem of escape—to rescue the soul from the clutches of time, ‘ineluctabile tempus’,—which Keats and Shelley tried to resolve for themselves by creating a new world in the past and the future, met Browning too. The new way which Browning has essayed—the way in which he accepts the present and deals with it, CLOSES with time instead of trying to elude it, and discovers in the struggle that this time, ‘ineluctabile tempus’, is really a faithful vassal of eternity, and that its limits serve and do not enslave illimitable spirit.”
—From a Paper by John B. Bury, B.A., Trin. Coll., Dublin, on Browning’s ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’, read at 38th meeting of the Browning Soc., Jan. 29, 1886. —
Wordsworth, and the other poets I have named, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, made such a protest against authority in poetry as had been made in the 16th century against authority in religion; and for this authority were substituted the soul-experiences of the individual poet, who set his verse to the song that was within him, and chose such subjects as would best embody and articulate that song.
But by the end of the first quarter of the present century, the great poetical billow, which was not indeed caused by, but received an impulse from, the great political billow, the French Revolution (for they were cognate or co-radical movements), had quite spent itself, and English poetry was at a comparatively low ebb. The Poetical Revolution had done its work. A poetical interregnum of a few years’ duration followed, in which there appeared to be a great reduction of the spiritual life of which poetry is the outgrowth.
Mr. Edmund W. Gosse, in his article ‘On the Early Writings of Robert Browning’, in the ‘Century’ for December, 1881, has characterized this interregnum a little too contemptuously, perhaps. There was, indeed, a great fall in the spiritual tide; but it was not such a dead-low tide as Mr. Gosse would make it.
At length, in 1830, appeared a volume of poems by a young man, then but twenty-one years of age, which distinctly marked the setting in of a new order of things. It bore the following title: ‘Poems, chiefly Lyrical. By Alfred Tennyson, London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, Cornhill, 1830.’ pp. 154.
The volume comprised fifty-three poems, among which were ‘The Poet’ and ‘The Poet’s Mind’. These two poems were emphatically indicative of the high ideal of poetry which had been attained, and to the development of which the band of poets of the preceding generation had largely contributed.
A review of the volume, by John Stuart Mill, then a young man not yet twenty-five years of age, was published in ‘The Westminster’ for January, 1831. It bears testimony to the writer’s fine insight and sure foresight; and it bears testimony, too, to his high estimate of the function of poetry in this world—an estimate, too, in kind and in degree, not older than this present century. The review is as important a landmark in the development of poetical criticism, as are the two poems I have mentioned, in the development of poetical ideals, in the nineteenth century.
In the concluding paragraph of the review, Mill says: “A genuine poet has deep responsibilities to his country and the world, to the present and future generations, to earth and heaven. He, of all men, should have distinct and worthy objects before him, and consecrate himself to their promotion. It is thus that he best consults the glory of his art, and his own lasting fame. . . . Mr. Tennyson knows that “the poet’s mind is holy ground”; he knows that the poet’s portion is to be
“Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love”;