The fault of almost all the modern English poets is that they are too artistic. Certainly their poetry cannot be blamed as carmen quod non.
Multa dies et multa litura coercuit, atque
Perfectum decies non castigavit ad unguem.
But it makes too much display of labor. We admire its artistic skill, and that is its principal attraction. We feel that it is not nature which is hymning amidst so much art. The result of such obvious effort betrays the handicraft of the artisan rather than the inspiration of the poet. It is the Versailles fountains
instead of Niagara. It cannot be too much insisted on that poetry is not one of the fine arts. The greater number of modern English poets, however, treat it as such, as much as is possible with only the imagery of words for their material. They are disciples rather of Horace than of Democritus. There is plenty of labor and litura, and of verse perfectum decies ad unguem; of ingenium miserâ fortunatius arte but little. They surpass in mountain-labor the forgotten Lucilius, who in versu faciendo sæpe caput scabunt, vivos et rodunt ungues; but they have too little of “the sacred madness of the bards” for admission into Helicon. The reason is not far to seek. We notice a similar phenomenon in Greece when religious belief was forced to retire before scepticism and the prating sophists. To the sceptical temper of the age is undoubtedly owing the labor devoted to expression, which has done all it could to reduce poetry to an art. It has also occasioned a certain subjectivity, if we may use the word—a painful mental analysis—which is fatal to poetry.
Robert Browning is the greatest offender in this regard. So painfully intense, in truth, is his introspection that he pays far less attention to expression than his contemporaries. Cut off from the divine suggestiveness of nature by his hard materialism, he does nothing but think; and thinking poetically rather than syllogistically is an unamalgamation. Thought and expression are alike confused, rugged, and difficult. The reader, without even melody of rhythm to help him on, stumbles and gropes through intricate sentences, parentheses in parentheses, a startling image here and there; anon a whirring flight of poetry, or what resembles it; but
the wings soon droop, and the poet is on the earth again, or lower than the earth—anywhere but soaring heavenwards. He has in him the making of a poet. Had he the Catholic faith, his imagination would carry him to great heights and keep him there. He might have soared nigh to Shakspere. His talent is dramatic—which is to say, his poetic gift is of the highest order; but nature has no divine suggestiveness to him, the hollow shell whispers no eternity in his dull ear; for him man has no end, events no purpose; and inasmuch as man has a definite end, and a sublime one, to which events definitely contribute, he is not able to create men and women, a destiny, or destinies, in any of which should there be a living verisimilitude. A plot in which men, women, and children talk and act as men, women, and children do talk and act is out of his reach. His highest effort is the dramatic poem, in which, however, occur at times passages of great dramatic power, showing what he could have done had he not been a heathen.
Mr. Tennyson has been the subject of various articles in The Catholic World; but so markedly does he contrast with Browning, and so noteworthy is the different bias given to the poetry of each by the materialistic spirit of the age, that we cannot afford to pass him by here in complete silence.
We may look in vain in the poetry of the laureate for passages of dramatic force such as now and then light up the creaking, groaning poetry of Browning; but he never grovels, as the latter does very often indeed.
Tennyson has strong sympathy with the one faith, and, as one may think, a kind of supernatural bias in