CHAPTER II

POETRY FROM 1830 TO 1850. THE GREATER POETS: TENNYSON AND BROWNING

While it is in the prose of Thomas Carlyle that we first find a key to the ultimate and deeper tendencies of literature, it is in verse that we see most clearly its characteristics for the moment. In the interesting preface to Philip van Artevelde, published in 1834, Henry (afterwards Sir Henry) Taylor remarked that the poetry which had been recently popular, of which he took Byron’s as typical, was marked by great sensibility and fervour, profusion of imagery and easy and adroit versification; while it showed inadequate appreciation of what he called the intellectual and immortal part, and a want of subject-matter. ‘No man,’ he adds, ‘can be a very great poet who is not also a great philosopher.’ About the poetry of his own days, he says that ‘whilst it is greatly inferior in quality, it continues to be like his [Byron’s] in kind.’

The criticism is just, and the aspiration is not only towards a desirable reform, but towards that which in point of fact has redeemed literature in the later decades of the century, and has given the Victorian age a position among the great poetic epochs of English literature. At the moment when Taylor wrote, the sinking so frequently noticeable between two great periods of literature was plainly to be seen, and it was far deeper in poetry than in prose. The great poets were somewhat later in coming than their brethren in prose, Macaulay and Carlyle; and, still more, it was longer before they proved to the satisfaction of criticism their title to be considered great. The field was for the time in possession of a band of minor poets, some of them not merely minor but insignificant. It is not enough to say that they are inferior to Byron, they belong to a different order altogether; for Byron, with all his faults, was great. It was however in his footsteps that they trod. As Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth have been the ruling powers since 1840, so during his brilliant life, and from his death down to about that year, was Byron. The poetry of the opening years of this period is therefore rightly affiliated to him. Even Tennyson, a man of wholly alien genius, felt the influence, as the Poems by Two Brothers shows; while the verse of Letitia Elizabeth Landon proves that sex was no barrier to it.

Want of subject-matter and of capacity for the intellectual and immortal part is precisely the defect of the poetry of those years. It is essentially trivial. It leaves the impression that the poet is writing not because he must, but because he has determined to do so. For the present purpose it is safer to draw conclusions from the work of a single great man than from that of many mediocre writers; and when we find Tennyson, already great in technical skill and graceful in style, sinking to triviality in subject and to commonplace sentiment, we look for an explanation not wholly confined to himself. We find it in the fact that those years were an interregnum between the philosophy of Rousseau and that gospel of work of which even Carlyle was as yet only half master, and which no one else had then grasped at all. Men were oppressed by a sense that the Revolution had shattered the old foundations of society; and they had scarcely gathered courage to attempt the task of reconstruction. To call therefore for a philosophy in poetry was right; but to supply it was impossible until the hour had come, and the man. Meanwhile the ordinary writer of verse groped in darkness or walked by a borrowed light. But in a sense, the man, or the men, had come, and the hour was rapidly approaching. Just three years before the beginning of the period Alfred Tennyson began to write, and just three years after it Robert Browning published his first poem.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

(1809-1892).

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born at Somersby in Lincolnshire, of which place his father was rector. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was contemporary with and made the acquaintance of an unusual number of men afterwards highly distinguished. Tennyson’s most intimate friend was Arthur Henry Hallam (1811-1833), son of the historian, and himself a writer of high promise, both in verse and prose. The literary remains published after Hallam’s death can only be regarded as the promise of something that might have been. There is nothing great in them, but there is evidence of power which would probably have led the writer to greatness. Dying so young however, Hallam is memorable not so much for anything he did himself, as for his influence on his friend, and especially for the fact that he inspired In Memoriam.

During his course at Cambridge Tennyson won the Chancellor’s prize with the poem of Timbuctoo, a piece above the ordinary prize-poem level, but not in itself remarkable. Still earlier, in 1827, he had joined with his brother Charles in a small volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers. But these compositions were merely boyish, and Tennyson’s first noteworthy contribution to literature was the Poems, chiefly Lyrical, of 1830. This was followed by another volume bearing the date 1833, and entitled simply Poems. Then came nine years of almost complete silence, broken, in 1842, by two volumes entitled once more, Poems. These mark the end of Tennyson’s first period of authorship. In the volumes of 1830 and 1833 we may look upon him as in many respects an apprentice in poetry; in those of 1842 he has passed far beyond mere apprenticeship. The Princess (1847) indicates a change in his method and in the nature of his ambitions; while In Memoriam (1850), though it has its roots in the early life of Tennyson, and was in part at least written when the grief it commemorates was fresh, is connected by its subject-matter rather with Tennyson’s later work and with the interests of the second half of the century. In the year when In Memoriam was published Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth in the laureateship, an office which he held for a longer period than any of his predecessors. His appointment was the public recognition of him as the chief poet of his time.

The most interesting feature of Tennyson’s writings during those years is the evidence of development they present; and this is especially important in any attempt to gauge the tendencies of the time. This evidence has been much obscured by changes and omissions. Part of the contents of the volumes of 1830 and 1833 has been incorporated in the collected editions of Tennyson’s poems. About half of the collection of 1842 consisted of select poems from the earlier volumes; but many pieces were omitted, and of those retained almost all were freely changed, and some nearly re-written. For this reason it is difficult for the reader of the present day to appreciate fairly the early criticisms of Tennyson. It is well known that he was severely handled, especially by Lockhart in the Quarterly Review; and it is supposed, on the ground of the poet’s great achievements, that this is only another example of perverse and utterly mistaken criticism. But such a judgment is hardly fair to the critic. Carlyle long afterwards condensed the criticism in his expressive way into a word,—‘lollipops.’ A great many of Tennyson’s early poems were ‘lollipops,’ dainty, exquisite, delicious to taste, but not food. They are elegant, not strong. They are deficient in two things essential to great poetry, depth of thought, and fervour of passion. The need of passion to poetry will be universally admitted; and to the need of thought, especially in the present century, one of the greatest of English critics has borne emphatic testimony. ‘I do not think,’ says Matthew Arnold in his Letters, ‘that any poet of our day can make much of his business unless he is intellectual.’

Now, among the early poems of Tennyson there are many pieces in which the want of these qualities is felt. He was certainly not in those days a poet of passion. His pulse temperately keeps time all the while he is drawing his Lilian, his Margaret and his Adeline. Though these pieces deserve, within certain limits, warm praise, they cannot be ranked as great poetry. They are masterpieces of grace, but they want depth. The writer is himself unmoved, and in consequence he leaves his readers equally calm. The same holds true of the thought in these volumes. It is usually cold and somewhat superficial. The critics, alive to these defects, were, it is true, both incautious and unfair. The early volumes contained a few poems showing no small force of mind, as well as a technical skill remarkable in so young a man. They contained, in particular, The Palace of Art and A Dream of Fair Women, both, even in their original shape, indubitably the productions of a strong intellect. In them also we find the exquisite Lotos-Eaters, with its wonderful melody, one of the most poetic poems Tennyson ever wrote, and one which, for suggestive beauty of thought as well as for rhythm, ranks among the masterpieces of the English language.

Tennyson then, judged by those early volumes, was a man who might prove to be less gifted intellectually than artistically. He certainly had grace, but it might be reasonably questioned whether he had much strength. On the other hand, it might prove that the surface show of weakness was the fault rather of the time than the man. For the production of truly great poetry two things must co-operate,—great gifts in the individual, and a great life in the community in which his lot is cast. Without the latter the former will lie dormant, like the strength of Samson till the Philistines are upon him. Now, this is exactly what has been described as the position of matters when Tennyson began to write. The old impulse which had stirred the giants of the Revolution was failing or was undergoing transformation; the new impulse was only beginning to be felt.

As the poet was, so to speak, in the balance, his next publication is an object of special interest. He had taken plenty of time; and an interval of nine years, considerable at any time of life, is great in the space between twenty and thirty. He had moreover undergone a great personal sorrow in the death of his friend Hallam. If any change was ever to take place in his work it might be expected now. And we do find a great change, partly in the tone of the new poems, and hardly less in the omissions and revisions of the old. The purely trivial pieces are not reprinted. It is hardly less instructive to note that in the lighter pieces which are retained the changes made are comparatively slight; for they were already nearly perfect of their kind. Very different is the treatment of the more weighty poems. Tennyson evidently felt that he had been less successful with these; and accordingly he freely revised all, and nearly rewrote some of them. The new pieces present similar evidence of development. The poet is still an artist first of all, but in a large proportion of the pieces he is a thinker as well. The whole tone of these volumes is therefore more thoughtful and more profoundly serious than that of their predecessors. Ulysses, Locksley Hall, Morte d’Arthur and the Vision of Sin may be mentioned as typical of the new work. Edward FitzGerald thought that Tennyson never rose above, nor even equalled, the poems of 1842; and, if we judge by the perfect balance of thought and expression, much might be said in defence of this view. At any rate, he had proved himself a poet who must be taken seriously, and it is from this date that we may regard his position among the greater English poets as assured. We have glimpses of artistic ideals to be realised and of intellectual problems to be solved. On the artistic side, the ideals are fundamentally a development from Keats, but they are a development by an original genius. On the intellectual side, Locksley Hall presents social problems, and the Vision of Sin raises moral and religious difficulties similar, it is true, in essence to those which men had discussed in former days, but seen in the light of the poet’s own time.

Hitherto Tennyson’s pieces had all been short. In 1847 he published his first long poem, the medley of The Princess. This serio-comic production on what is called ‘the woman question’ will probably not hold for long a high place among Tennyson’s works. The main body of it contains no great illuminating thought. The reflexions upon the position of women and the relations of the sexes are not beyond the range of an intelligence considerably short of genius, and the jest and earnest are not very happily mingled. The poem is remarkable rather for fine passages than for greatness as a whole. In point of length it was the most important experiment Tennyson had yet made in the most difficult but most flexible form of English metre, blank verse. There is however no part of The Princess of similar length which can be ranked as equal to Morte d’Arthur; and its best feature, the lyrics between the parts, were a subsequent addition. But whatever may be the intrinsic merit of The Princess, it is valuable as a symptom. The poet who had at first held so far aloof from the interests of everyday life is now found devoting his longest work to a social question of the day. He is at least endeavouring to be what Sir Henry Taylor says the great poet must be, a philosopher as well as an artist. If ‘art for art’s sake’ be the proper creed of the poet, then Tennyson is wrong, and he remains wrong all the rest of his life. We must rank him among those poets who seek to base their work on an intellectual foundation, not among those who hold that feeling alone is sufficient. He seeks to see Truth as well as Beauty, instead of resting satisfied, like Keats, with their ultimate identity.