“It would be idle to inquire, of these two kinds of poetic faculty in operation, which is the higher or even rarer endowment. If the subjective might seem to be the ultimaterequirement of every age, the objective, in the strictest state, must still retain its original value. For it is with this word, as starting-point and basis alike, that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned. The spiritual comprehension may be infinitely subtilized, but the raw material it operates upon must remain. There may be no end of the poets who communicate to us what they see in an object with reference to their own individuality; what it was before they saw it, in reference to the aggregate human mind, will be as desirable to know as ever. Nor is there any reason why these two modes of poetic faculty may not issue hereafter from the same poet in successive perfect works, examples of which, according to what are now considered the exigencies of art, we have hitherto possessed in distinct individuals only. A mere running in of the one faculty upon the other is, of course, the ordinary circumstance. Far more rarely it happens that either is found so decidedly prominent and superior as to be pronounced comparatively pure: while of the perfect shield, with the gold and the silver side set up for all comers to challenge, there has yet been no instance. A tribe of successors (Homerides), working more or less in the same spirit, dwell on his discoveries and reinforce his doctrine; till, at unawares, the world is found to be subsisting wholly on the shadow of a reality, on sentiments diluted from passions, on the tradition of a fact, the convention of a moral, the straw of last year’s harvest. Then is the imperative call for the appearance of another sort of poet, who shall at once replace this intellectual rumination of food swallowed long ago, by a supply of the fresh and living swathe; getting at new substance by breaking up the assumed wholes into parts of independent and unclassed value, careless of the unknown laws for recombining them (it will be the business of yet another poet to suggest those hereafter), prodigal of objects for men’s outerand not inner sight; shaping for their uses a new and different creation from the last, which it displaces by the right of life over death,—to endure until, in the inevitable process, its very sufficiency to itself shall require, at length, an exposition of its affinity to something higher—when the positive yet conflicting facts shall again precipitate themselves under a harmonizing law, and one more degree will be apparent for a poet to climb in that mighty ladder, of which, however cloud-involved and undefined may glimmer the topmost step, the world dares no longer doubt that its gradations ascend.”
“It would be idle to inquire, of these two kinds of poetic faculty in operation, which is the higher or even rarer endowment. If the subjective might seem to be the ultimaterequirement of every age, the objective, in the strictest state, must still retain its original value. For it is with this word, as starting-point and basis alike, that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned. The spiritual comprehension may be infinitely subtilized, but the raw material it operates upon must remain. There may be no end of the poets who communicate to us what they see in an object with reference to their own individuality; what it was before they saw it, in reference to the aggregate human mind, will be as desirable to know as ever. Nor is there any reason why these two modes of poetic faculty may not issue hereafter from the same poet in successive perfect works, examples of which, according to what are now considered the exigencies of art, we have hitherto possessed in distinct individuals only. A mere running in of the one faculty upon the other is, of course, the ordinary circumstance. Far more rarely it happens that either is found so decidedly prominent and superior as to be pronounced comparatively pure: while of the perfect shield, with the gold and the silver side set up for all comers to challenge, there has yet been no instance. A tribe of successors (Homerides), working more or less in the same spirit, dwell on his discoveries and reinforce his doctrine; till, at unawares, the world is found to be subsisting wholly on the shadow of a reality, on sentiments diluted from passions, on the tradition of a fact, the convention of a moral, the straw of last year’s harvest. Then is the imperative call for the appearance of another sort of poet, who shall at once replace this intellectual rumination of food swallowed long ago, by a supply of the fresh and living swathe; getting at new substance by breaking up the assumed wholes into parts of independent and unclassed value, careless of the unknown laws for recombining them (it will be the business of yet another poet to suggest those hereafter), prodigal of objects for men’s outerand not inner sight; shaping for their uses a new and different creation from the last, which it displaces by the right of life over death,—to endure until, in the inevitable process, its very sufficiency to itself shall require, at length, an exposition of its affinity to something higher—when the positive yet conflicting facts shall again precipitate themselves under a harmonizing law, and one more degree will be apparent for a poet to climb in that mighty ladder, of which, however cloud-involved and undefined may glimmer the topmost step, the world dares no longer doubt that its gradations ascend.”
If we measure Browning’s own work by the poetic standards which he has himself set up in the course of that work, it is quite evident that he has on the whole lived up to them. He has shown himself to be an illustration of the evolutionary principles in which he believes by breaking away from all previous standards of taste in poetry. The history of poetry in England has shown this to be a distinctive characteristic of all the greatest English poets. From Shakespeare down they have one and all run afoul of the critics whose special province seems to be to set up literary shibboleths which every genius is bent upon disregarding. When Spenser was inventing his stanza, verse critics were abject in their worship of hexameters, and their hatred of bald rhymes. Though these sticklers for classical forms could see clearly enough that Spenser was possessed ofgenius, they yet lamented the blindness of one, who might have written hexameters, perversely exclaiming “Why a God’s name may not we as else the Greeks have the kingdom of our own language, and measure our accents by the sound, reserving quantity to the verse?” When Milton appears and finds blank verse the medium best suited to his subject, he comes up against the rhyming standards of his day and is forced to submit to the indignity of having his “Paradise Lost” “tagged with rhymes,” as he expresses it, by Dryden, who graciously devoted his powers of rhyme to an improved version of the poem. Milton was actually obliged to defend himself in his preface to “Paradise Lost” for using blank verse, as Browning defends himself in the Epilogue to “Pacchiarotto and How We Worked in Distemper” for writing “strong” verse instead of the “sweet” verse the critics demand of him.
By the time the nineteenth century dawns the critics are safely intrenched in the editorial den, from which, shielded by any sort of shibboleth they can get hold of, they may hurl forth their projectiles upon the unoffending head of the genius, who, with no chance of firing back in the open arena of the magazine, must either suffer in silence or take refugein sarcastic slurs upon his critics in his poetry, for here lies the only chance of getting even without waiting for the whirligig of time to bring the public round to a recognition of the fact that he is the one who has in very truth, “fished the murex up.”
The caliber of man who could speak of “The Ode to Immortality” as “a most illegible and unintelligible poem,” or who wonders that any man in his senses could put his name to such a rhapsody as “Endymion,” or who dismissed “Prometheus Unbound” with the remark that it was amélangeof nonsense, cockneyism, poverty and pedantry, would hardly be expected to welcome “Sordello” with effusion. Even very intelligent people cracked unseemly jokes upon the appearance of “Sordello,” and what wonder, for Browning’s British instinct for freedom carried him in this poem to the most extreme lengths. In “Pauline” he had allied himself with things familiar to the English reader of poetry. Many of the allusions are classical and introduced with a rich musicalness that Shelley himself might have envied. The reminiscences of Shelley would also come within the intellectual acreage of most of the cultured people of the time. And even in “Paracelsus,” despite the unfamiliarity of thesubject, there was music and imagery such as to link the art with the admired poetic art of the day, but in “Sordello” all bounds are broken.
No one but a delver in the byways of literature could, at that time, have been expected to know anything about Sordello; no one but a historian could have been expected to know about the complicated struggles of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines; no one but a philosopher about the tendencies, both political and literary, manifesting themselves in the direction of the awakening of democratic ideals in these pre-Dantean days; no one but a psychologist about the tortuous windings of Sordello’s mind.
Only by special searching into all these regions of knowledge can one to-day gain a complete grasp of the situation. He must patiently tread all the paths that Browning trod before he can enter into sympathy with the poet. Then he will crack no more jokes, but he will marvel at the mind which could wield all this knowledge with such consummate familiarity; he will grow ecstatic over the splendors of the poem, and will regret its redundancy not of diction so much but of detail and its amazing lack of organic unity.
No one but a fanatic could claim that“Sordello” is a success as an organic work of art. While the poet had a mastery of knowledge, thought and feeling, he did not have sufficient mastery of his own form to weld these together into a harmonious and convincing whole, such mastery as he, for example, shows in “The Ring and the Book,” though even in that there is some survival of the old redundancy.
One feels when considering “Sordello” as a whole as if gazing upon a picture in which the perspective and the high lights and the shadows are not well related to each other. As great an abundance of detail is expended upon the less important as upon the more important fact, and while the details may be interesting enough in themselves, they dislodge more important affairs from the center of consciousness. It is, not to be too flippant, something like Alice’s game of croquet in “Through the Looking Glass.” When the hedgehog ball is nicely rolled up ready to be struck, the flamingo mallet walks off somewhere else.
There, then, in “Sordello” is perhaps the most remarkable departure from the accepted in poetic art that an Englishman has ever attempted. In its elements of failure, however, it gave “a triumph’s evidence,” to usethe poet’s own phrase, “of the fulness of the days.” In this poem he had thrown down the gauntlet. His subject matter was not to be like that of any other poet, nor was his form to be like that of any other poet. He discarded the flowing music of “Pauline” and of “Paracelsus.” His allusions were no longer to be classic, but to be directly related to whatever subject he had in hand; his style was also to be forth-right and related to his subject, strong, idiomatic, rugged, even jolting if need be, or noble, sweeping along in large rhythms or couched in rare forms of symbolism, but, whatever it was to be, always different from what had been.
All he required at the time when “Sordello” appeared was to find that form in which he could so unify his powers that his poems would gain the organic completeness necessary to a work of art. No matter what new regions an artist may push into he must discover the law of being of this new region. Unless he does, his art will not convince, but the moment he does, all that was not convincing falls into its right place. He becomes the master of his art, and relates the new elements in such a way that their rightness and their beauty, if not immediately recognized, are sure sooner or later to berecognized by the evolving appreciator, who is the necessary complement, by the way, of the evolving artist. Before “Sordello” Browning had tried three other forms; the subjective narrative in “Pauline,” the dramatic poem in “Paracelsus,” a regular drama in “Strafford,” which however runs partly parallel with “Sordello” in composition. He had also done two or three short dramatic monologues.
He evidently hoped that the regular drama would prove to be the form most congenial to him, for he kept on persistently in that form for nearly ten years, wrote much magnificent poetry in it and at times attained a grandeur of dramatic utterance hardly surpassed except in the master of all dramatists, Shakespeare. But while he has attained a very genuine success in this form, it is not the success of the popular acting drama. His dramas are to-day probably being left farther and farther aside every moment in the present exaggerated demands for characters in action, or perhaps it might be nearer the truth to say clothes horses in action. Besides, the drama of action in character, which is the type of drama introduced into English literature by Browning, has reached a more perfect development in other hands. Ibsen’s dramas are preëminently dramas of action incharacter, but the action moves with such rapidity that the audience is almost cheated into thinking they are the old thing over again—that is, dramas of characters in action.
Browning’s characters in his dramas are presented with a completeness of psychological analysis which makes them of paramount interest to those few who can and like to listen to people holding forth to any length on the stage, and with superb actors, who can give every subtlest change of mood, a Browning drama furnishes an opportunity for the utmost intensity of pleasure. Still, one cannot help but feel that the impressionistic psychology of Ibsen reaches a pinnacle of dramatic art not attained by Browning in his plays, delightful in character portrayal as they are, and not upon any account to have been missed from dramatic literature.
In the dramatic monologue Browning found just that form which would focus his forces, bringing them into the sort of relationship needed to reveal the true law of being for his new region of poetic art.
If we inquire just why this form was the true medium for the most perfect expression of his genius, I think we may answer that in it, as he has developed it, is given an opportunity for the legitimate exercise of hismental subtlety. Through the voice of one speaker he can portray not only the speaker but one or more other characters, and at the same time show the scene setting, and all without any direct description. On the other hand, his tendency to redundancy, so marked when he is making a character reveal only his own personality, is held in check by the necessity of using just those words and turns of expression and dwelling upon just those details which will make each character stand out distinctly, and at the same time bring the scene before the reader.
The people in his dramatic monologues live before us by means of a psychology as impressionistic as that of Ibsen’s in his plays. The effect is the same as that in a really great impressionistic painting. Nature is revealed far more distinctly—the thing of lights and shadows, space and movement—than in pictures bent upon endless details of form. “My Last Duchess” is one among many fine examples of his method in monologue. In that short poem we are made to see what manner of man is the duke, what manner of woman the duchess. We see what has been the duke’s past, what is to be his future, also the present scene, as the duke stands in the hall of his palace talking to an ambassadorfrom the count who has come to arrange a marriage with the duke for the count’s daughter. Besides all this a glimpse of the ambassador’s attitude of mind is given. This is done by an absolutely telling choice of words and by an organic relationing of the different elements. The law of his genius asserts itself.
Browning’s own ideal of the poet who makes others see was not completely realized until he had perfected a form which would lend itself most perfectly to the manner of thing which he desired to make others see—namely, the human soul in all its possible manifestations of feeling and mood, good, bad, and indifferent, from the uninspired organist who struggles with a mountainous fugue to the inspired improvisor whose soul ascends to God on the wings of his music, from the unknown sensitive painter who cannot bear to have his pictures the subject of criticism or commerce to the jolly life-loving Fra Lippo, from the jealous, vindictive woman of “The Laboratory” to the vision-seeing Pompilia, from Ned Bratts to Bishop Blougram, and so on—so many and wonderful that custom cannot state their infinite variety.
Consistent, so far, with his own theories we find the work of Browning to be. He also follows his ideal in the discarding of classicalallusion and illustration. Part of his dictum that the form should express the thought is shown in his habitual fitting of his allusions to the subject he is treating. By this means he produces his atmosphere and brings the scene clearly before us; witness his constant references to Molinos and his influence in “The Ring and the Book,” an influence which was making itself felt in all classes of society at the time when the actual tragedy portrayed in the poem occurred. This habit, of course, brings into his poetry a far wider range of allusions unfamiliar to his contemporaries than is to be found in other Victorian poets, and makes it necessary that these should be “looked up” before an adequate enjoyment of their fitness is possible. Hence the Browning societies, so often held up to ridicule by the critics, who blindly prefer to show their superior attitude of mind in regard to everything they do not know, and growl about his obscurity, to welcoming any movement which means an increase of general culture. The Browning societies have not only done much to make Browning’s unusual allusions common matters of knowledge, but they have helped to keep alive a taste for all poetry in an age when poetry has needed all the friendly support it could get.
All great poets lead the ordinary mind to unfamiliar regions of knowledge and thereby to fresh planes of enjoyment. That Browning has outdone all other poets in this particular should be to his honor, not to his dispraise.
In one very marked direction, however, he is not a perfect exemplar of his own theories—that is, he is not always consistently dramatic. He belongs to that order of poets described by himself in the Shelley Introduction as neither completely subjective nor completely objective, but with the two faculties at times running in upon each other. He is often absolutely objective in his expression of a mood or a feeling, but the moment the mood takes upon it the tinge of thought we begin to feel Browning himself.
The fundamental principles upon which he bases his own solution of the problems of existence are seen to crop out, colored, it is true, by the personality of the speaker, but yet traceable to their source in the mental make up of Browning himself. It may well be that Browning has come so near to the ultimate truth discoverable by man in his fundamental principles that they are actually universal truths, to be found lying deep down at the roots of all more partial expressions, just as gravitation, conservation of energy,evolution underlie every phenomena of nature, and therefore when a Pope in “The Ring and the Book,” a Prince Hohenstiel-Swangau, a Bishop Blougram, a Cleon or a John in “The Death in the Desert,” give utterance to their views upon life, they are bound to touch from one or another angle the basic principles of life common to all humanity as well as to the poet—the center within us all where “truth abides in fulness.”
This would seem an even more complete fusing of the two faculties in one poet than that spoken of by Browning, where a poet would issue successive works, in some of them the one faculty and in some of them the other faculty being supreme.
That Browning was, to a certain extent, a poet of this third order of which he prophesied is true, for he has written a number of poems like “La Saisiaz,” “Reverie,” various of his prologues and epilogues which are purely subjective in content. There are also subjective passages in the midst of other poems, like those in “Sordello,” “Prince Hohenstiel,” the “Parleyings,” etc. If we place such a poem as “Reverie” side by side with “Fra Lippo Lippi” we see well-nigh perfect illustrations of the two faculties as they existed in the one poet, Browning. On the otherhand, in those poems where the thought, as I have said, suggests Browning, in the speech of his characters he has something of the quality of what Browning calls the subjective poet of modern classification. “Gifted like the objective poet, with the fuller perception of nature and man, he is impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to the many below as to the One above him, the supreme intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth, an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet’s soul.”
Browning may be said to have carried to its flood tide the “Liberal Movement in English Literature,” as Courthope calls it, inaugurated at the dawn of the century by the Lake School, which reacted against the correct school of Dryden and Pope. Along with the earlier poets of the century he shared lack of appreciation at the hands of critics in general. The critics had been bred in the school of the eighteenth century, and naturally would be incapable of understanding a man whose thought was permeated with the doctrines of evolution, then an unknown quantity except to the elect in scientific circles, and not to become the possession of the thinking world at large until beyond themiddle of the century; whose soul was full of the ardor of democracy, shown not only in his choice and treatment of subjects, but in his reckless independence of all the shibboleths of the past; and whose liberalness in the treatment of moral and religious problems was such as to scandalize many in an age when the law forbade that a man should marry his deceased wife’s sister, and when the Higher Criticism of the Bible had not yet migrated to England from Germany; and, finally, whose style was everything that was atrocious because entirely different from anything they had seen before.
The century had to grow up to him. It is needless to say that it did so. Just as out of the turmoil of conflicting scientific and religious thought has emerged a serene belief in man’s spiritual destiny, so out of the turmoil of conflicting schools of criticism has arisen a perception of the value of the new, the original, the different in art. Critics begin to apply the principles of evolution to their criticism as Browning applied it to his art, with the result that they no longer measure by past standards of art but by relating the art to the life of the time in its various manifestations, not forgetting that the poet or the dramatist may have a further vision ofwhat is to come than any other man of his age.
The people first, for the most part, found out that here in Browning’s work was a new force, and calmly formed themselves into groups to study what manner of force it might be, regardless of the sneers of newspaperdom and conventional academies. And gradually to the few appreciative critics of the early days have been added one authoritative voice after another until the chorus of praise has become a large one, and Browning, though later than any great poet of the century, is coming into his own.
In a certain chart of English literature with which I am acquainted, wherein the poets are graphically represented in mountain ranges with peaks of various heights, Tennyson is shown as the towering peak of the Victorian Era, while Browning is a sturdy but much lower peak with a blunted top. This is quite symbolic of the general attitude toward Browning at the end of the century, for, with all the appreciation, there has been on the part of authority a disinclination to assign to him the chief place among the poets of the Victorian Era. Courthope, who most of the time preserves a remarkable reticence upon Browning, voices this general attitudein a remark ventured upon in one of his lectures in 1900. He says:
“No one who is capable of appreciating genius will refuse to admire the powers of this poet, the extent of his sympathy and interest in external things, the boldness of his invention, the energy of his analysis, the audacity of his experiments. But so absolutely does he exclude all consideration for the reader from his choice of subject, so arbitrarily, in his treatment of his themes, does he compel his audience to place themselves at his own point of view, that the life of his art depends entirely upon his own individuality. Should future generations be less inclined than our own to surrender their imagination to his guidance, he will not be able to appeal to them through that element of life which lies in the Universal.”
To the present writer this seems simply like a confession on Courthope’s part that he was unable to perceive in Browning the elements of the Universal which are most assuredly there, and which were fully recognized by a Scotch writer, Dawson, at the same time that Courthope was questioning his power to hold coming generations.
“The fashions of the world may change,” writes Dawson, “and the old doubts maywear themselves out and sink like shadows out of sight in the morning of a stronger faith; but even so the world will still turn to the finer poems of Browning for intellectual stimulus, for the purification of pity and of pathos, for the exaltation of hope.
“Or if the darkness still thickens, all the more will men turn to this strong man of the race, who has wrestled and prevailed; who has illumined with imaginative insight the deepest problems of the ages; who has made his poetry not merely the vehicle of pathos, passion, tenderness, fancy, and imagination, but also of the most robust and masculine thought. He has written lyrics which must charm all who love, epics which must move all who act, songs which must cheer all who suffer, poems which must fascinate all who think; and when ‘Time hath sundered shell from pearl,’ however stern may be the scrutiny, it may be said that there will remain enough of Robert Browning to give him rank among the greatest of poets, and secure for him the sure reward of fame.”
But it is to France we must go for the surest authoritative note—that land of the Academy and correct taste whichhumsandhahsover its own Immortals in proverbiallyunpenetrating conclave. No less a man than Taine declares that Browning stands first among English poets—“the most excellent where excellence is greatness, the most gifted where genius is a common dower.”
While there can be no doubt that Browning outdid all the other great poets of his time in “azure feats,” in developing an absolutely self-centered ideal of art, which is yet so true to the ultimate tendencies of the century, indeed to those of all time, for evolution and democracy are henceforth the torch-bearers of the human soul—each of the other half-dozen or so greatest poets had distinct and independent individualities which were more nearly the outcome of the current tendencies of the time than Browning’s.
Alfred Tennyson
Tennyson was equally familiar with the thought and much more familiar with the politics of the day, but there is an infinite difference in their attitude. Browning, if I may be excused for quoting one of Shakespeare’s most abused phrases, rides over the century like a “naked new-born babe striding the blast.” Tennyson ambles through it on a palfrey which has a tendency to flounder into every slough of despond it comes to. This may seem to be putting it rather toostrongly, but is it not true? Browning has the vision belonging to the latest child of time. He never follows; he leads. With his eyes fixed upon a far-off future where man shall bemanat last, he faces every problem with the intrepidity of an Œdipus confronting the Sphynx. The mystery of its riddles has no terrors for him. It is given to him as to few others to see the ineffable beauty of life’s mystery, the promise it holds out of eternal joy. While he frequently discourses upon the existence of evil, he never for a moment admits any doubt into his own utmost soul of the beneficent part evil is meant to play in the molding of human destinies. Mr. Santayana has called him a barbarous poet. In a certain sense he is, if to be born among the first on a new plane of psychic perception where of no account become the endless metaphysical meanderings of the intellect, which cry “proof, proof, where there can be no proof,” is barbarous. It was doubtless largely owing to this power of vision reminding us again somewhat of the child’s in Maeterlinck’s “Les Aveugles” which kept Browning from tinkering in the half-measures of the political leaders of his time. His plane is not unlike that of his own Lazarus, about whom the Arab physician says:
“The man is witless of the size, the sum,The value in proportion of all things,Or whether it be little or be much.Discourse to him of prodigious armamentAssembled to besiege his city now,And of the passing of a mule with gourds—’Tis one! Then take it on the other side,Speak of some trifling fact,—he will gaze raptWith stupor at its very littleness,(For as I see) as if in that indeedHe caught prodigious import, whole results;And so will turn to us the bystandersIn ever the same stupor (note this point)That we, too, see not with his opened eyes.”
The import of an event is everything. Large imports may lurk more surely in the awakening of some obscure soul than in the pageantry of law bringing a tardy and wholly inadequate measure of justice to humanity. Though Tennyson talks of the “far-off divine event” he has no burning conviction of it and does not ride toward it with triumph in his eye and flaming joy in his soul. As he ambles along, steeping himself in the science of the time, its revelations make him nervous; he falls into doubt from which he can only extricate himself by holding on to belief, a very different thing from Browning’s vision.
Thus it happens that Tennyson voices thefeelings of an immense class of cultured people, who have gone through the century in the same ambling fashion, a prey to its fears, intellectual enough to see the truths of science, but not spiritual enough to see the import of the dawn of the new day.
Tennyson, then, quite of and in his time, would desire above all things to appeal to it as it appealed to him. He waxes enthusiastic over conventional politics, he treats his social problems so entirely in accordance with the conventions of the day that they are not problems at all, and he is quite in love with the beauty of aristocratic society, though he occasionally descends to the people for a subject. These are all entirely sufficient reasons for his popularity as a poet during his life, further emphasized by the added fact that having no subject matter (that is thought-content) wherewith to startle the world by strangeness, he took the wiser part of delighting them with his exquisite music.
Though so satisfactory a representative of his times, he did outrage one of the shibboleths of the critics in his efforts to find a new and richer music than poets had before used by bringing scientific imagery into his verse. Of all the absurd controversies indulged inby critics, the most absurd is that fought out around the contention that science and poetry cannot be made to harmonize. Wordsworth was keen enough to see this before the rest of the world and prophesied in the preface to his “Lyrical Ballads” that science would one day become the closest of allies to poetry, and Tennyson was brilliant enough to seize the new possibilities in scientific language with a realization that nature imagery might almost be made over by the use in describing it of scientific epithets. A famous illustration of the happy effects he produced by these means is in the lines “Move eastward happy Earth and round again to-night.” His observation of Nature, moreover, had a scientific accuracy, which made possible far more delicate and individual descriptions of Nature’s aspects than had been produced before. It was also a happy thought for him to weave so much of his poetry around the Arthurian legends. Beautiful in themselves, they came nearer home than classical or Italian legends, and, when made symbolic of an ideal which must appeal to the heart of every cultured Englishman, who regarded himself as a sort of prototype of the blameless King Arthur, and whose grief at the failure of the social fabric planned by him would be as poignantas that of the King himself, they carried with them a romantic and irresistible attraction.
The reasons why Tennyson should appeal especially to the nineteenth century cultured and highly respectable Englishman far outweighed any criticisms that might be made by critics on his departure from poetic customs of the past. He pleased the highest powers in the land, became Laureate and later Lord Tennyson. He will therefore always remain the poet most thoroughly representative of that especial sort of beauty belonging to a social order which has reached a climax of refinement and intelligence, but which, through its very self-satisfaction, cuts itself off from a perception of the true value of the new forces coming into play in the on-rushing stream of social development.
The other poets who divide with Browning and Tennyson the highest honors of the Victorian Era are Landor, Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, Mrs. Browning, George Meredith.
Landor and Arnold preserved more than any of the others a genuine classical aroma in their verse, and on this account have always been delighted in by a few. After all, the people may not immediately accept a poet of too great independence, but they are least ofall likely to grow enthusiastic over anything reactionary either in style or thought. Romantic elements of not too startling a character win the favor of most readers.
Though classic in style both these poets reflected phases of the century’s thought. Landor differed from Browning in the fact that he frequently expressed himself vigorously upon the subject of current politics. His political principles were not of the most advanced type, however. He believed in the notion of a free society, but seems to have thought the best way of attaining it would be a commonwealth in which the wise should rule, and see that the interests of all should be secured. Still his insistence upon liberty, however old-fashioned his ideas of the means by which it should be maintained, puts him in the line of the democratic march of the century.
Swinburne calls him his master, and represents himself in verse as having learned many wise and gracious things of him, but his thought was not sufficiently progressive to triumph over the classicism of his style in an age of romantic poetry, though there will always be those who hold on to the shibboleth that, after all, the classic is the real thing in poetry, never realizing that where the romantic is old enough, it, too, becomes classic.
Matthew Arnold stands in poetry where men like Huxley and Clifford stood in science, who, Childe-Roland like, came to the dark tower, calmly put the slug horn to their lips and blew a blast of courage. Science had undermined their belief in a future life as well as destroying the revealed basis of moral action. In such a man the intellectual nature overbalances the intuitional, and when inherited belief based on authority is destroyed, there is nothing but the habit of morality left.
Arnold has had the sympathy of those who could no longer believe in their revealed religion, but who loved it and regretted its passing away from them. He gives expression to this feeling in lines like these:
“The sea of faithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world.”
The regret for something beautiful that is gone is capable of exquisite poetic treatment, but it is not an abiding note of the century. It represents only one phase of its thought,and that a transcient one, because it could be felt with poignancy only by those whose lives were rudely shaken by the destruction of the ideal in which they had been bred and in which they devoutly believed. Arnold’s sympathetic treatment of this phase of doubt seems, however, to have been of incalculable service to those who felt as he did. It softened the anguish of the shock to have not only the beauty of the past dwelt upon, but to have the beauty of courage in the face of a destroyed ideal erected into a new ideal for living brave and noble lives. In “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” is a fine example of the beauty which may be imparted to a mood as melancholy as could well be imagined:
“Not as their friend, or child, I speak!But as, on some far northern strand,Thinking of his own Gods, a GreekIn pity and mournful awe might standBefore some fallen Runic stone—For both were faiths, and both are gone.“Wandering between two worlds, one deadThe other powerless to be born,With nowhere yet to rest my head,Like these, on earth I wait forlorn,Their faith, my tears, the world deride—I come to shed them at their side.”
Such hope as he has to offer comes out instanzas like the following, but all is dependent upon strenuous living:
“No, no! the energy of life may beKept on after the grave, but not begun;And he who flagg’d not in the earthly strife,From strength to strength advancing—only he,His soul well-knit, and all his battle won,Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.”
Nor shall better days on earth come without struggle since life
“Is on all sides o’ershadowed by the highUno’erleaped Mountains of Necessity,Sparing us narrower margin than we deem.Nor will that day dawn at a human nod,When, bursting through the network, superposedBy selfish occupation—plot and plan,Lust, avarice, envy-liberated man,All difference with his fellow-mortal closed,Shall be left standing face to face with God.”
Though Arnold was sternly criticised he had before the end of the century been accorded his proper place as a poet, which was that of the chief poet between the greatest lights of the century, Browning and Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelite group. Gosse, with more penetration than can always be accorded to him, declares that “His devotion to beauty, the composure, simplicity and dignity of histemper, and his deep moral sincerity gave to his poetry a singular charm which may prove as durable as any element in modern verse.”
The phase of romanticism carried to its climax by the pre-Raphaelite poets Rossetti and his sister, Morris and Swinburne had, like the work of Tennyson, its full recognition, in its own time, because these poets, like him, have put into exquisite music romantic subjects derived both from the classics and from mediæval legend. The new note of sensuousness, due largely to the Italian influence of Rossetti, with his sensuous temperament, his intensity of passion and his love of art, and also in Morris and Swinburne to their pagan feeling, one of the elements inaugurated by the general breaking down of orthodox religious ideals through the encroachments of science, does not seem to have affected their popularity.
As there were those who would sympathize with the Tennysonian attitude toward doubt, and those who would sympathize with Matthew Arnold’s, there were others to feel like Swinburne, pantheistic, and, like Morris, utterly hopeless of a future, while others again might criticise the pagan feeling, but, with their inheritance of beauty from Tennyson and his predecessors of the dawn of the century, woulddelight in these new developments of the romantic spirit.
A. C. Swinburne
Ruskin is said to have been the original inspirer of these four poets, though Fitz-Gerald’s “Rubaiyat” of Omar Khayyám was not without its influence. But as Edmund Gosse says, “The attraction of the French romances of chivalry for William Morris, of Tuscan painting for D. G. Rossetti, of the spirit of English Gothic architecture for Christina Rossetti, of the combination of all these with Greek and Elizabethan elements for Swinburne, were to be traced back to start—words given by the prophetic author of the ‘Seven Lamps of Architecture.’”
Though the first books of this group of poets, the “Defence of Guenevere” (1858), “Goblin Market,” “Early Italian Poets,” “Queen Mother and Rosamond” (1861), did not make any impression on the public, with the publication of Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon” an interest was awakened which reached a climax with the publication of Rossetti’s poems in 1870. Rossetti had thrown these poems into his wife’s grave, as the world knows, but was prevailed upon to have them recovered and published.
In the success of this group was vindicated at last the principles of the naturalists of thedawn of the century. Here was a mixture of color, of melody, of mysticism, of sensuousness, of elaboration of form which carried originality and independence as far as it could well go in a direction which painted life primarily from the outside. But when this brilliant culminating flash of the early school of Coleridge and Keats began to burn itself out, there was Tennyson, who might be called the conservative wing of the romantic movement, dominant as ever, and Browning, the militant wing, advanced from his mid-century obscurity into a flood-tide of appreciation which was to bear him far onward toward literary pre-eminence, placing him among the few greatest names in literature.
The originality of the pre-Raphaelites grew out of their welding of romantic, classical, and mediæval elements, tempered in each case by the special mental attitude of the poet.
Rossetti and his brother artists, Millais and Holman Hunt, who founded the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of painters, pledged themselves to the fundamental principle laid down by Rossetti in the little magazine they started called theGerm. This new creed was simple enough and ran: “The endeavor held in view throughout the writings on art willbe to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of Nature.”
In their interpretation and development of this simple principle, artists and the poets who joined them differentiated from one another often to a wide extent. In Rossetti, it becomes an adoration of the beauty of woman expressed in ultra-sensuous though not in sensual imagery, combined with an atmosphere of religious wonder such as one finds in mediæval poets, of which “The Blessed Damozel” stands as a typical example. In it, as one appreciator has said, all the qualities of Rossetti’s poetry are found. “He speaks alternately like a seer and an artist; one who is now bewitched with the vision of beauty, and now is caught up into Paradise, where he hears unutterable things. To him the spiritual world is an intense reality. He hears the voices, he sees the presences of the supernatural. As he mourns beside the river of his sorrow, like Ezekiel, he has his visions of winged and wheeling glory, and leaning over the ramparts of the world his gaze is fixed on the uncovered mysteries of a world to come. There is no poet to whom the supernatural has been so much alive. Religious doubt he seems never to have felt. But the temper of religious wonder, the old, childlike, monkishattitude of awe and faith in the presence of the unseen, is never absent in him. The artistic force of his temperament drives him to the worship of beauty; the poetic and religious forces to the adoration of mystery.”
To Swinburne the simplicity of nature included the utmost lengths to which eroticism could go. Upon this ground he has been severely censured and he has had an unfortunate influence upon scores and scores of younger writers who have seemed to think that the province of the poet is to decry the existence of sincere affection, and who in their turn have exercised actual mischief in lowering social standards.
This is not all of Swinburne, however. His superb metrical power is his chief contribution to the originality of this group, and when he developed away from his nauseating eroticism, he could charm as no one else with his delicious music, though it often be conspicuous for its lack of richness in thought.
His fate has been somewhat different from that of most poets. When his “Atalanta in Calydon” was published it was received with enthusiasm, but the volumes overweighted with eroticism which followed caused a fierce controversy, and many have not even yet discovered that this was only one phase ofSwinburne’s art, and that, unfortunate as it is in many respects, it was a phase of the century’s life which must find its expression in art if that life is to be completely given, and that it was a passing phase Swinburne himself proved in the development of other phases shown in his interest in current political situations, his enthusiasm for Italy and his later expressions of high moral ideals, as well as in a quasi-religious attitude of mind, not so far from that of Emerson, himself, in which strong emphasis is placed upon the importance of the individual, and upon the unity of God and man.
There is moral courage and optimism in the face of doubt of a high order in the following lines:
—“Are ye not weary and faint not by the waySeeing night by night devoured of day by day,Seeing hour by hour consumed in sleepless fire?Sleepless; and ye too, when shall ye, too sleep?—We are weary in heart and head, in hands and feet,And surely more than all things sleep were sweet,Than all things save the inexorable desireWhich whoso knoweth shall neither faint nor weep.“Is this so sweet that one were fain to follow?Is this so sure when all men’s hopes are hollow,Even this your dream, that by much tribulationYe shall make whole flawed hearts, and bowed necks straight?—Nay though our life were blind, our death were fruitless,Not therefore were the whole world’s high hope rootless;But man to man, nation would turn to nation,And the old life live, and the old great word be great.”
But Swinburne in his farthest reaches of pantheistic aspiration is to be seen in a poem like “Hertha”:
“I am that which began;Out of me the years roll;Out of me God and man;I am equal and whole;God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.“The tree many-rootedThat swells to the skyWith frondage red-fruitedThe life-tree am I;In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves; ye shall live and not die.“But the Gods of your fashionThat take and that give,In their pity and passionThat scourge and forgive,They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off; they shall die and not live.“My own blood is what stanchesThe wounds in my bark:Stars caught in my branchesMake day of the dark,And are worshipped as suns till the sunrise shall tread out their fires as a spark.”
Morris’s interpretation of pre-Raphaelite tenets took him into mediæval legend and the classics for his subject matter. In his first volume, “The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems,” he came into competition with Tennyson, who was at the same time issuing his Arthurian legends. The polish of Tennyson’s verse, as well as its symbolical meaning for the time, was more acceptable than the actual return to the nature of the fifteenth century, and this the first volume from a pre-Raphaelite was hardly noticed by the critics. Morris sulked within his literary tents for ten years before he again appeared, this time with “The Life and Death of Jason” (1867), which immediately became popular. Later came the “Earthly Paradise.” These tales, in verse noble and simple, in style recalling the tales of Chaucer, yet with a charm all their own, in which the real men and women of Chaucer give place to types, have been the delight of those who like to find in poetry a dreamland of romance where they may enjoy themselves far from the problems and toils of everyday life. He differs from all the other poets of this group in his lack of religious hope. His mind was of the type that could not stand up against the undermining influences of the age: henceworld-weariness and despair are the constantly recurring notes.