Victorian Literature — Chapter I: The Poets. Part 1.

The Poets When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, most of the great poets who had been inspired by the French Revolutionary epoch were dead.

Keats had died in Rome in 1821, Shelley was drowned in the Gulf of Spezzia in 1822, Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824, Scott at Abbotsford in 1832, and Coleridge at Highgate in 1834. Southey was Poet Laureate, although Wordsworth held a paramount place, recognised on all hands as the greatest poet of the day.

The gulf which separates the =Southey (1774-1843)= of the laureateship from the Southey who presents himself to our judgment to-day is almost impossible to bridge over.

Southey, as the average bookman thinks of him now, is the author of a "Life of Nelson" and of one or two lyrics and ballads.

[1] The "Life of Nelson" is constantly republished for an age keenly bent on Nelson worship, but for the exacting it has been superseded by at least two biographies from living authors.

[2] That Southey should live mainly by a book which was merely a publisher's commission, and not by the works which he and his contemporaries deemed immortal, is one of the ironies of literature.

Southey's "Cowper" is a much better biography than his "Nelson," but in Cowper the world has almost ceased to be interested.

It does not now read "Table Talk" and "The Task" any more than it reads "Thalaba" and "Madoc," although every cultivated household of sixty years ago could talk freely of these poems.

There will probably be a revival of interest in Cowper.

It is safe to assume that there will never be a revival of interest in Southey, and that his very lengthy poems are doomed to oblivion.

And yet it is interesting to note where Southey's contemporaries placed him.

Shelley thought "Thalaba" magnificent, and its influence was marked in "Queen Mab."

Coleridge spoke of its "pastoral charm."

Landor found "Madoc" superb.

Scott said that he had read it three or four times with ever-increasing admiration.

It kept Charles James Fox out of bed till the small hours!

But inexorable time has declared that these poems have no permanent place in literature.

Time, however, has left us a kindly memory of Southey the man.

Sara Coleridge's assertion that he was "on the whole the best man she had ever known," tallies with the judgment of many others of his contemporaries--who did not come into collision with his relentless prejudices.

Relentless prejudice was equally a characteristic of Southey's greater successor as Poet Laureate.

=William Wordsworth (1770-1850)= had written all the poems by which he will live when the Queen came to the throne, but further recognition awaited the author of "Lyrical Ballads" and "Laodamia" in the thirteen years of his life that were yet to come.

It was in 1839 that Keble, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, welcomed Wordsworth when he received the honorary degree of D. C. L.

with the eulogy that he had "shed a celestial light upon the affections, the occupations and the piety of the poor."

In 1842 he obtained an annuity from the Civil List, and in the following year he succeeded Southey as laureate.

The mere fact, however, that Wordsworth wrote nothing of importance in the present reign does not permit of his dismissal as a pre-Victorian author.

His real influence, splendid and serene, was made upon the age which is passing away.

He found us when the age had bound Our souls in its benumbing round;

He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.

During the period in which Wordsworth's poems were coming from the press he was scoffed at alike by Byron and by the authors of "Rejected Addresses," and they appealed to a sympathetic audience.

Coleridge had, indeed, praised him generously enough, but the author of "The Ode to Duty" knew nothing of the enthusiastic partisanship which was to be his lot in the later years of his life, and for more than a quarter of a century after his death.

I have before me two books which will serve to indicate the high-water-mark of Wordsworth's popularity.

One is a volume of selections from his poems, which was edited by Mr Matthew Arnold,[3] the other, a volume of Transactions of the Wordsworth Society, which was privately issued to the members.

In his little volume of "Selections" Mr Arnold, then recognised on all hands as our most important living critic, insisted upon Wordsworth's pre-eminence in poetry, placing him indeed on a level with Shakspere and Milton, and assigning to Byron and Shelley a secondary rank.

Mr Arnold, as events proved, only echoed a pervading sentiment.

The Wordsworth Society was founded, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dean of St Paul's, the Lord Chief Justice of England, the then American Minister--Mr Lowell--and a number of distinguished literary men, among its members.

The Transactions of that Society give evidence that among the thoughtful men and women of the last decade Wordsworth was by far the strongest influence, that he was not merely a literary tradition, but that he was a vital force in the minds and hearts of nearly all the most interesting people of the period.

Students of to-day, however, will be well content to read Wordsworth only in Matthew Arnold's "Selections."

Here they will find him as a sonneteer proclaiming liberty with scarcely less zeal and power than Milton.

They will find him as the sympathetic friend of the poor and of the oppressed.

To be dead to the charm of Matthew Arnold's "Selections from Wordsworth" is to care nothing for poetry.

To appreciate with any measure of enthusiasm the twelve volumes of Wordsworth's collected writings is equally to have one's sense of true poetry deadened and destroyed.

We have no time now for "The Excursion" and "The Prelude."

We have less for Wordsworth's "Ecclesiastical Sonnets" and "The Borderers."

For his copious prose moralizings one has no toleration whatever.

It is not easy to judge whether =Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)= will ever cease to retain the very wide hold upon the public which was his for at least thirty years prior to his death, and which is his to-day.

The poems of Tennyson might be read by succeeding generations of Englishmen if only for their exquisite purity of style.

Music he has also in abundance.

In "Harold," "Queen Mary," and his other plays there is no great gift of characterisation, and these assuredly will go the way of Southey's more ambitious poems.

But in "Maud" Tennyson caught the social aspiration of his time with singular insight.

The world, he pleaded--and England in particular--was given over to money-getting.

The capitalist was more tyrannical than the old, expiring slave-owner.

Even peace was a mere word.

There was a worse tyranny than that which left men for dead on the battle-field.

There was the tyranny which ground them to dust for a bare pittance in mill and factory.

Tennyson never wrote with greater force or with more perfect dramatic and lyric art, and his poem is as striking and effective to-day as at the time of its publication in 1855. Lord Tennyson--for the Poet Laureate accepted a peerage in 1890--won the hearts of a wider audience by "In Memoriam," and of a still larger one by "The Idylls of the King."

"In Memoriam," a lengthy elegy on his college friend, Arthur Hallam, touched the great religious public of England.

The poem reflected a certain transcendentalism of view which was fast becoming fashionable.

"There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds" was, in fact, more and more the prevailing tone among all phases of Protestantism where a few years earlier the exact opposite had been insisted upon.

One of the most agreeable pictures which our literary period affords is offered by the friendship between Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning.

The two men were not seldom compared; each had his partisans, and each his enthusiastic disciples.

Neither from a social nor from a literary point of view would they seem to have had much in common.

Browning was a regular diner-out, he appeared systematically at every picture-gallery, and at every public entertainment, and in all these things he was keenly interested: he loved society.

Lord Tennyson, on the other hand, lived a retired life in one or other of his country houses.

He was morbidly sensitive to the attentions of the crowd, and amusing stories are told of his desire to avoid the "vulgar" gaze.

Considered as literary men, the contrast between these poets was greater.

Tennyson's language was dainty, simple, full of grace; his characters monotonous, lacking in vigour.

Browning wrote with rugged force, and sometimes with an obscurity which left the reader bewildered.

But his gift of characterisation was superb, and his men and women for individuality are comparable only to those of Shakspere.

The hearts of all of us go out to Tennyson when we think of the music of his verses, of his gifts of natural description, his fine and captivating imagination; but our hearts and our intellects go out to Browning, as to one who has enshrined our best thoughts, who has touched all our deepest emotions.

It is true that half of Browning's sixteen volumes are flatly incomprehensible to the majority of us; but the other half are equal in bulk to the whole of Lord Tennyson's writings, and quite free from any suspicion of obscurity.

The "Ring and the Book" is not obscure.

It is an exciting story, dramatically told.

So also are the poems called "Men and Women," and the "Dramatic Idyls."

"Luria," "In a Balcony," "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon," are as readable as railway novels.

And yet Browning had, and has, none of the popularity of Tennyson.

The one writer sold by thousands, and his financial reward was probably unprecedented in poetry; the other had but a small audience, an audience which never approached to one-third of his rival's. Notwithstanding all this, it is pleasing to note that the two poets loyally esteemed one another, as the dedication of some of their books conspicuously proves.

To write thus early of =Robert Browning (1812-1889)= is to anticipate in the literary record.

"Pauline," the poet's first poem, was published, it is true, in 1833; and that and successive poems were accepted by good critics as the work of a true poet.

Nevertheless, Browning had to fight his way as no poet of equal merit has ever had to do, and it was very late indeed in the Victorian epoch that he became more than the poet of a limited circle.

One there was, certainly, who appreciated his work from the first with no common fervour, for the world has long been familiar with the statement that a reference by Elizabeth Barrett in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" first brought the two poets together in 1845-- "From Browning some 'Pomegranate' Which, if cut deep down the middle, Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, Of a veined humanity."

They were married a year later.

As exemplifying the condescension of their earlier contemporaries it is interesting to note Wordsworth's observation on the event--and Wordsworth had no humour--"So, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett have gone off together!

Well, I hope they may understand each other--nobody else could!"

Lord Granville, who was staying in Florence when a son was born to the poets there in 1849, was still more amusing although equally uncritical.

"Now there are not two incomprehensibles but three incomprehensibles," he said.

It cannot be charged against =Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)= that she was in the least incomprehensible.

Her "Cry of the Children," "Cowper's Grave," and "Aurora Leigh," have the note of extreme simplicity.

Nor is obscurity a characteristic of "Sonnets from the Portuguese," which were not translations, but so named to disguise a wife's devotion to her husband.

"Aurora Leigh" she styled a "novel in verse," and it was in fact a very readable romance, marked by that zest for social reform which characterised the period.

[4] "The most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered," she wrote of it.

After the marriage the pair lived principally at Florence.

In their Florentine home--Casa Guidi--"Aurora Leigh," and "Casa Guidi Windows" were written, and here Mrs Browning died in June 1861. One may still see the house upon which the Florentine municipality has inscribed a tablet in gratitude for the "golden ring" of poetry with which the enthusiastic woman poet had attempted to unite England and Italy.

Another great Florentine by adoption, =Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)=, came to live near the Brownings.

His rugged nature must have been not a little soothed by the gentle little woman with "a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl."

Landor was educated at Rugby, at Ashbourne, and at Trinity College, Oxford.

From Rugby he was removed to avoid expulsion, and at Oxford he was rusticated.

All this was the outcome of an excitable temperament, which led in later life to domestic complications, and to exile from his family in Florence.

It found no reflection in his many beautiful works.

As a poet, however, Landor holds no considerable rank, although here placed among them.

"Gebir" was published in 1798 and "Count Julian" in 1812. Both these lengthy poems have received the rapturous praise of authoritative critics, De Quincey even declaring that Count Julian was a creation worthy to rank beside the Prometheus of Æschylus and Milton's Satan.

Southey insisted indeed that Landor had written verses "of which he would rather have been the author than of any produced in our time."

But Landor's poems, although obtainable in his collected works, and published in selections, command no audience to-day.

With his prose the case is otherwise.

There is little in the six volumes of "Imaginary Conversations," or in the two volumes of "Longer Prose Works," that does not merit attention alike for style and matter.

"Give me," he says in one of his prefaces, "ten accomplished men for readers and I am content."

Landor has all accomplished men for readers now.

And all are at one with the critic who said that, "excepting Shakspere, no other writer has furnished us with so many delicate aphorisms of human nature."

Mr Swinburne's expression of veneration is well known.

"I came as one whose thoughts half linger, Half run before;

The youngest to the oldest singer That England bore.

I found him whom I shall not find Till all grief end;

In holiest age our mightiest mind, Father and friend."

The connecting link between Landor and his young admirer is sufficiently apparent.

In genuine accomplishment, the imaginative literature of our era has produced no one comparable to Landor, save only =Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837- )=.

Mr Swinburne has written well in several languages other than his own.

In his own he has written tragedies of wider purpose than those of Tennyson, of equal insight with those of Browning.

He has written noble sonnets, lyrics of exquisite melody, and one poem, "Ave atque Vale," which takes rank among the imperishable elegies of our literature.

He has abundant spontaneity and a marvellous gift of rhythm.

Added to all this, he is a critic of almost unequalled learning and distinction.

He was the first to give adequate recognition to the poetic genius of Matthew Arnold and Emily Brontë.

He knows Elizabethan literature with remarkable thoroughness, and he knows the literature of many ages and many lands better than most of the professors.

His appreciation of Charles Lamb endears him to English readers, and his eulogies of Victor Hugo command the respect of Frenchmen.

A great poet and a great prose writer, Mr Swinburne is perhaps the most distinguished literary figure of our day.

Only when in the distant years his country has lost him, will a great folly be generally recognised.

Why, it will be asked, did we not spontaneously call for him--arch democrat and arch rebel though he may have been--as the only possible successor to Lord Tennyson as Poet Laureate?

It has been said that Mr Swinburne was the first to recognise the great poetical gifts of =Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)=.

Writing in the Fortnightly Review in 1867,[5] he remarked that the fame of Mr Matthew Arnold had for some years been almost exclusively the fame of a prose writer.

"Those students," he continued, "could hardly find hearing, who with all esteem and enjoyment of his essays ...

retained the opinion that, if justly judged, he must be judged by his verse and not by his prose."

The view that Arnold excelled as a prose writer continued to hold sway for many years after Mr Swinburne wrote, and it was current up to the date of Arnold's death.

"Literature and Dogma" and "God and the Bible," the former of which first appeared in 1873, excited an extraordinary amount of attention, and helped largely to modify the religious beliefs of many men and women now rapidly approaching middle age.

The son of a famous clergyman, Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby, Matthew Arnold was a product of that Broad Church movement which Dr Arnold had helped largely to inspire.

A fellow-pupil of Dr Stanley, Dean of Westminster, Arnold went further than the Dean in his opposition to supernaturalism in religion, though he stopped short of the fiery antagonism which another eminent Anglican churchman, Bishop Colenso, displayed towards the miraculous stories of the Old Testament.

But far more than Stanley or Colenso did he influence the Protestant Christianity of his day.

This, however, scarcely enters into the discussion of Matthew Arnold the poet.

More akin to that side of Arnold's life is his literary criticism.

For many years he held in this field a well nigh undisputed throne.

For a time he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford.

But his influence came mainly through a volume called "Essays in Criticism" (1865), of which it is not too much to say that the paper entitled "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," gave a new impulse to all students of books.

Here and elsewhere Arnold emphasised the opinion that not only a fine artistic instinct but a vast amount of knowledge, admitting of comparisons, is necessary as the equipment of a critic.

Criticism he defined as "a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world."

Matthew Arnold had other claims as a prose writer.

His appeal for the study of Celtic literature initiated and encouraged a revival of learning in Wales and in Ireland; and his books and essays on Education--for his main income for many years was derived from his salary as an Inspector of Schools--did much to further the cause which his brother-in-law, Mr W. E.

Forster, began with the great Education Act of 1870. But it is as a poet, as Mr Swinburne foretold, that Matthew Arnold lives in literature.

It is strange to some of us to note how largely the bulk of his prose work has dropped out of the memory of the younger generation.

The diligent collector possesses some forty-five volumes of Mr Arnold's writings; but although there has been a cheap reprint of many of these, it is only by his collected poems that he is widely known to-day.

Mr Swinburne, in the essay to which I have referred, tells of the joy with which, as a schoolboy, he came upon a copy of "Empedocles on Etna."

He must then have been about fifteen years of age, as "Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems by A" was published in 1852. It contained "Tristram and Iseult," "Stanzas in Memory of the Author of 'Obermann,'" and many now accepted favourites.

"The Strayed Reveller" by "A" was a still earlier volume of anonymous verse (1849); and, in 1853, "Poems" by Matthew Arnold made the poet known by name to a small circle.

A substantial recognition as a poet did not however fall to Matthew Arnold while he lived.

His career is, indeed, a striking example of the fact that our views of contemporary literature require to be revised every decade.

Ten years ago everyone was discussing Matthew Arnold's views concerning Isaiah and St Paul, and the Nonconformists, whom he chaffed good-humouredly, have reconstructed many of their beliefs through a study of his works.

People were excited by his views on education and by his views on literature, but not by his poetry.

To-day his poetry is all of him that remains, and its charm is likely to soothe the more strenuous minds among us for at least another generation, and perhaps for all time.

In "Thyrsis," a striking elegy on =Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861)=, Arnold struck a note which has only Milton's "Lycidas" and Shelley's "Adonais" to call forth comparisons.

Clough was not a Keats, but he was a more considerable personage than Milton's friend, and indeed he has been persistently underrated by many men of letters.

Not indeed by all.

"We have a foreboding," said Mr Lowell, "that Clough will be thought a hundred years hence, to have been the truest expression in verse of the moral and intellectual tendencies of the period in which he lived."

Clough was the son of a cotton merchant of Liverpool, and he was a pupil of Dr Arnold at Rugby.

He gained a Balliol scholarship, and went into residence in 1837. The coming years brought doubts and distractions, religious and political, and Clough parted from Oxford.

His most famous poem, "The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich," was published in 1848. In 1852 he sailed to Boston in the same ship that carried Thackeray and Lowell.

Emerson, who had met him in England, welcomed him there.

Travelling through Europe for his health, he died of paralysis in Florence in 1861. [6]