The Age of Tennyson

The same movement visible in the poetry of Arnold and Clough may be detected still moulding and modifying the works of Tennyson. In the year 1850 In Memoriam appeared. It was the product of long meditation, and part is known to have been written as early as 1833. Nevertheless it is remarkable that just in the year when Browning published his Christmas Eve and Easter Day, and just about the time when Arnold’s verse was exhibiting another aspect of the interest in religion, Tennyson too should have made his greatest contribution in this kind to literature. For while In Memoriam is of all great English elegies the most closely associated with the man to whom it is dedicated, still the treatment opens up the questions of death and immortality; and the passages of the poem which have clung to the popular memory are those in which the poet expresses his convictions or his hopes on these subjects. Perhaps the greatest weakness of In Memoriam is its length. It is difficult if not impossible to dwell on the subject of death long, and to preserve perfect healthiness of tone. The other great English elegies are in the first place much shorter, and in the second place the writers find more relief to them than Tennyson does. The intensity of his friendship for Arthur Hallam kept him perhaps even too strictly to his subject.

In Memoriam is essentially a lyrical poem, and the years immediately before and after its publication are those in which Tennyson’s lyrical genius was in fullest flower. Maud (1855) is a lyrical poem. The beautiful songs interspersed between the parts of The Princess belong to this period, and so does the grand Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. The lyrics of these years are on the whole superior both in fervour of passion and in weight of thought to the earlier lyrics. Some of the songs, like ‘Tears, idle tears,’ are, as songs, almost overcharged with thought, yet they are beautifully melodious; and Tennyson never wrote anything more full of exquisite sound than ‘The splendour falls on castle walls.’

The Ode on the Death of Wellington is worthy of study, because it is the best specimen of a class of poems for which Tennyson was distinguished from first to last. He was always a patriot, and there is no feeling he expresses more fervently than that of pride in England. He contrasts her stability with the fickleness of France. He is proud of her freedom slowly won and surely kept. Patriotic ballads like The Revenge and The Defence of Lucknow are among the most prominent characteristics of his later volumes. His great success in the case of the Ode is due to the fact, first that his heart is stirred by the sense that ‘the last great Englishman is low;’ and secondly, to the fact that he saw in Wellington an impersonation of all that he had admired in England. The picture he draws of the duke is identical in its great features with that he had painted of the nation, and it has the advantage of being concrete.

The passionate fervour of which Tennyson’s lyric strain was capable is best illustrated from Maud, a poem which it is more easy to praise in parts than as a whole; for it must be admitted that the character of the hero is deficient in greatness and self-restraint; and the part which depicts his madness is poor. A good deal of at best exaggerated blame has likewise been meted out to the references to war in the course of the poem. But these faults are more than redeemed by such lyric outbursts as ‘Come into the garden, Maud,’ and ‘O that ’twere possible.’ The first is perhaps the most splendid, as it is one of the most justly popular, of all Tennyson’s lyrics; while the second is among the most exquisite and delicately finished. These pieces have a deeper tone of feeling and more reality of passion than we find in Tennyson’s earlier lyrics.

The Idylls of the King are the outcome of an interest in Arthurian legends that seems to have gradually developed. The Lady of Shalott proves that Tennyson’s mind was dallying with the story of Arthur as early as 1833; and Sir Galahad and Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere attest the continuance of the interest in the volumes of 1842. Another piece, the Morte d’Arthur, published along with these, was afterwards embodied in the Idylls. It was professedly a fragment, and the epic of which it was described as the sole relic was spoken of disparagingly as ‘faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth.’ Notwithstanding the disparagement, The Passing of Arthur is the gem of the Idylls; but the reference serves at least to direct attention to an actual difference between Tennyson’s earlier and later work. Though the Morte d’Arthur is far from being a mere echo of Homer, there are numerous lines and phrases in it directly recalling Homer, and different in tone from the context. In the later Idylls the classical allusions seem to be one with the piece, they do not call attention to themselves but are transformed and made Tennyson’s own.

There is no clear evidence before 1859 of an intention to treat the Arthurian story as a whole. In that year four of the idylls were published; but they were still fragments, and great gaps were left between. Gradually the gaps were filled, until in 1885 the poem was completed. Still, the connexion of the parts is loose. Each idyll is a separate story, related to the others because all are parts of one greater story. But the idylls have not the coherence required in the books of an epic. Tennyson was conscious of the want of unity, and he sought for a principle of connexion in allegory. At best the allegory is very indistinct; it appears chiefly in the parts later in order of publication; and we may suspect that it was an after-thought meant to supply a defect to which the author slowly awakened. The very name, Idylls of the King, serves as a warning not to expect too much unity. An ‘idyll’ is a short story, and the word therefore indicates the essentially episodic character of the whole poem.

The Idylls were, as they still are, Tennyson’s greatest experiment in blank verse; and next to Milton’s Paradise Lost they are the finest body of non-dramatic blank verse in the language. The form had gone out of fashion in the eighteenth century. Thomson, it is true, revived it, and the poets of the period of the Revolution followed his example. But through the early death of Keats, through that feebleness of will which robbed the world of an untold wealth of poetry in Coleridge, and through the fate that forbade Wordsworth to write long poems well, it remained true that no very great and sustained modern English poem was written in blank verse. The measure attracted Tennyson, and he soon mastered it. A number of pieces prior to the Idylls seem to be experiments in preparation for a bolder flight. The English Idylls, Ulysses, Aylmer’s Field, Sea Dreams and Lucretius are specimens. The measure is used on a larger scale in The Princess. But Tennyson’s supreme success was in the Idylls of the King. They cannot be said to rise higher than the best of the early poems; for the English Idylls include the Morte d’Arthur, and Ulysses is among the finest of Tennyson’s poems. These pieces show the same exquisite grace, the same smoothness, the same variety of pause, the same skill in the use of adjuncts, such as alliteration. But there is necessarily more scope and variety in a long poem; and one of the finest features of Tennyson’s verse is the flexibility with which it adapts itself to the soft idyllic tone appropriate to Enid, to the darkness of moral degradation in The Last Tournament, to the crisis of the parting of Arthur and Guinevere, to the spiritual rapture of The Holy Grail, and to the mysticism of The Passing of Arthur. Tennyson cannot equal the stateliness of Milton; but Milton is the only poet with whom, in respect of blank verse, he need greatly fear comparison.

When we come down to later years the principal change visible in Tennyson’s work is the development of the dramatic element. The dramas proper have been the most neglected of all sections of his work; but ‘the dramatic element’ is by no means confined to them. They are rather just the final result of a process which had been long going on. Tennyson, as we have already seen, gradually put more and more thought into his verse. In doing so he felt the need of a closer grip of reality, and he found, as other poets have found too, that the dramatic mode of conception brought him closest to the real. This is all the more remarkable because nothing could well be more foreign to the dramatic spirit than his early work. His youthful character sketches are not in the least dramatic. Neither is there much trace of humour, a quality without which true dramatic conception is impossible. The change begins to show itself about the middle of the century. In The Grandmother and The Northern Farmer we have genuine dramatic sketches of character. The poet does not regard them from his own point of view, he speaks from theirs. The Northern Farmer is moreover rich in humour. Tennyson never surpassed this creation, but he multiplied similar sketches. All his poems in dialect are of a like kind. They are in dialect not from mere caprice, but because the characters could only be painted to the life by using their own speech. Other pieces, not in dialect, like Sir John Oldcastle and Columbus, are likewise dramatic in their nature. Less prominent, but not less genuine, is the dramatic element in the patriotic ballads, such as The Revenge. The greater part of the work of Tennyson’s last twenty years is, in fact, of this nature, and herein we detect the principal cause of the change of which all must be sensible in that work as compared with the work of his youth. The old smoothness and melody are in great part gone, but a number of pieces prove that Tennyson retained the skill though he did not always choose to exercise it. It is the early style with which his name is still associated, and probably the majority of his readers have never been quite reconciled to the change. But while we may legitimately mourn for what time took away, we ought to rejoice over what it added, rather than left. If there is less melody there is more strength; if the delightful dreamy languor of The Lotos-Eaters is gone, we have the vivid truth of The Northern Farmer and The Northern Cobbler, and the tragic pathos of Rizpah; if the romantic sentiment of Locksley Hall is lost, something more valuable has taken its place in the criticism of life in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.

Tennyson’s dramas then, surprising as they were when they first appeared, are merely the legitimate and almost the inevitable outcome of his course of development. Inevitable he seems to have felt them, for he persevered in the face of censure or half-hearted approval, perhaps it should be said, in the face of failure. A deep-rooted scepticism of his dramatic powers has stood in the way of a fair appreciation. The fame of his earlier poetry has cast a shadow over these later fruits of his genius; and the question, ‘Is Saul also among the prophets?’ was hardly asked with greater surprise than the question whether Tennyson could possibly be a dramatist. And, in truth, at sixty-six he had still to learn the rudiments of his business. Queen Mary (1875) is a failure. It is not a great poem, and still less is it a great drama. The stage is overcrowded with dramatis personæ who jostle each other and hide one another’s features. Harold (1876) showed a marked advance; but Becket (1884) was the triumph which justified all the other experiments. It is a truly great drama, and, though not yet recognised as such, will probably rank finally among the greatest of Tennyson’s works. The characters are firmly and clearly delineated. Becket and Henry, closely akin in some of their natural gifts, are different in circumstances and develop into very different men. Rosamond and Eleanor are widely contrasted types of female character, the former a little commonplace, the latter a subtle conception excellently worked out. All the materials out of which the play is built are great. No finer theme could be found than the mediæval conflict between Church and State; and Tennyson has seized it in the true dramatic way, as concentrated in the single soul of Becket, torn between his duty to the Church and his duty to the King, whose Chancellor and trusted friend he had been and to whom he owed his promotion.

The minor dramatic pieces are of inferior worth, and in some of them, as for example, The Promise of May and The Falcon, Tennyson showed a certain infelicity in his choice of subjects. But their failure leaves unimpaired the interest of the dramatic period. It seemed an almost wanton experiment on the part of Tennyson. But he was an artist all his life, and here too he was only obeying the inherent law of development of his art. Instead of wantonness, there is deep pathos in the old man’s perseverance under unfamiliar conditions, and there can only be joy at his final success. There is surprise too that he who, from his earlier work, would have been judged one of the least dramatic of poets, should have so decidedly surpassed a poet so markedly dramatic as Browning.

Tennyson wrote up to the very close of his long life. His last publications were The Foresters and The Death of Œnone. They show some decline of power. Demeter too (1889) was probably a little below his level. But previous to that, though there had been change, there had been nothing that can be called decay. For the long period of sixty years and upwards Tennyson had written, and with rare exceptions he had written greatly. From the death of Wordsworth to his own death he was almost universally looked upon as the first poet of his time. No one else has wielded so great an influence. In no other poet’s work is the record of change during the period so clearly written. In part he made the age, in still larger measure it made him. The hesitancy of his early work was typical of the spirit of the time. The gradual awakening, the deeper thought, the larger subjects, the more varied interests of the intermediate period, were typical too. In this last period, while Tennyson was as faithful as ever to the law of his own development, he did not move precisely with the time. Another race was rising and other palms were to be won.

Browning could not go through the same phase of development, for in him the intellectual element from the first was even abnormally prominent. Yet in Browning too the influence of the time is felt. Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850) handles topics to which he is perpetually recurring; but in it they are seen in a new light. The poet had heard the noise of the Tractarian controversy, and in Christmas Eve he passes in review the three principal phases of contemporary opinion regarding religion,—the evangelical, represented by the Nonconformist Chapel, the Catholic, represented by Rome, and the critical, represented by the German professor in his lecture-room. It is significant that while Browning can accept neither of the two former, he prefers both to the third. Both are intellectually indefensible, yet in both the vital thing, love, is present, while it is not to be found in the lecture-room. Both ‘poison the air for healthy breathing,’ but the critic ‘leaves no air to poison.’ There is throughout the poem an unquestionable bias towards finding as much true as will by any means pass muster with the intellect. Long afterwards, in La Saisiaz (1878), Browning handled the same problems in a more boldly speculative spirit, though still with the same bias. The difference is largely due to time; for before the date of La Saisiaz Browning had adopted a method more philosophical than artistic. But partly, perhaps, it was due to his wife, who was alive when Christmas Eve was written, and dead long before La Saisiaz.

In the period between these two poems the same problems were frequently in Browning’s mind, and no section of his work is richer in thought and poetic beauty than that which expresses them. In Karshish, with its vivid realisation of the mind of a thoughtful heathen longing for a faith, in A Death in the Desert, where the St. John is rather a man of the age of Strauss than of the first century, in The Pope and in Rabbi Ben Ezra, we have Browning’s deepest treatment of the problems which interested him most, and we have not that sacrifice of poetry to philosophy which mars La Saisiaz. We may say that about this time Browning discovered the vital interest of his generation, and discovered also where his own strength lay. The effect is seen in the uniform excellence of his work. The publications of the twenty years between 1850 and 1870, taken as a whole, certainly surpass what he had done before or what he did afterwards. Men and Women (1855) has been probably the most popular and the most widely read of all his writings; Dramatis Personæ (1864) is even richer in poetry, but has been commonly felt to be more difficult in thought; while The Ring and the Book (1868-1869) is by almost all competent judges pronounced his masterpiece.

The plan of The Ring and the Book, whereby the same story is told ten times over from ten different points of view, is defensible only on the ground that it succeeds. Nearly half the poem is hardly worth reading; yet the other half so splendidly redeems it that The Ring and the Book ranks among the great poems of modern times. The pictures of Caponsacchi, of Guido, of Pompilia and of the Pope are all great. Guido has the interest, unique in this poem, of appearing twice; and there is no better illustration of the subtlety of Browning’s thought than the difference between the Count, plausible, supple and polished, pleading for his life, and the man Guido, stripped of all but bare humanity, condemned to death, first desperately petitioning, then tearing off the veil of hypocrisy and uttering his terrible truths both about himself and the messengers who bear his sentence. Pompilia is Browning’s most perfect female character; but, though a beautiful creation, she illustrates one of the defects in his dramatic art. She speaks Browning’s speech, and she thinks his thought. Simple child as she is, there is a depth of philosophy in her utterances that is not in strict keeping with her character; and she, like all Browning’s men and women, uses the abrupt vivid language of the poet. Notwithstanding his almost passionate repudiation of the idea, Browning is a self-revealing poet; and nowhere does he reveal himself more than in the Pope, the greatest character in The Ring and the Book. In him the resemblance to Browning himself does not matter, it rather adds a new interest. The mind can conceive and picture nothing higher than its own ideal best; and the Pope is Browning’s ideal man, great in intellect, in morals and in faith. In two other cases, Rabbi Ben Ezra and A Death in the Desert, Browning has given similar glimpses of his own ideal, but they are less full than the view we get in The Pope.

To Browning’s middle period belong likewise many of his love-poems, and these are unique in the English language. Others, like Shakespeare and Burns and Shelley, have given a more purely captivating expression to the ardour of love; no one else has so worked out its philosophy. Not that Browning’s poems are deficient in feeling; the expressions of his own love for his wife, ‘O lyric love’ and One Word More, would suffice to refute such a criticism. But he prefers to take an aspect of passion and to explain it by the way of thought. He is analytical. The best example is James Lee’s Wife, which goes through a whole drama of passion, and might be described, like Tennyson’s Maud, as ‘a lyrical mono-drama.’ This, for good or evil, is another method from that of ‘Take, oh take those lips away,’ or ‘I arise from dreams of thee,’ or ‘Of a’ the airts.’ There is both gain and loss in Browning’s way of treatment. On the one hand, the lyric strain is less pure. If poetry ought to be ‘simple, sensuous and impassioned,’ and it has been generally thought that lyric poetry in particular should be so, then is Browning’s less in harmony with the ideal. On the other hand, because his is a new way Browning impresses the reader with his originality; and because it is a thoughtful way he has a wide range. Moreover, it is a purifying and ennobling way. No poet free, as Browning is, from the taint of asceticism has ever treated the passion of love in a manner so little physical as he. There are in his works errors of taste that cause a shudder; but they are not here.

It was likewise during this period that Browning was at his dramatic best. Nearly all his best pieces are dramatic in conception, though sometimes, as in the love-poems, we are confined to single aspects of character. Not to speak of the great figures of The Ring and the Book, there is ample variety in Men and Women and in Dramatis Personæ. There are few figures more clearly drawn or more easily remembered than Andrea del Sarto; and My Last Duchess is equally fine. In these two pieces Browning has succeeded better than elsewhere in keeping himself in the background. Fra Lippo Lippi has likewise the stamp of dramatic truth, and is rich in humour; and Bishop Blougram is at once an excellent character, and, though a satirical conception, the mouthpiece of some serious thought.

In the last twenty years of his life Browning, on the whole, appears at his worst. We have seen how the development of Tennyson, though not unattended with loss, carried with it much compensating gain. There are some indications that Tennyson felt the influence of his great contemporary. The metrical effects of his later poems, as well as the studies of character, are sometimes suggestive of Browning. It would have been well if Browning had in turn borrowed a few hints from Tennyson; but unfortunately he went steadily along his own course, bringing into ever greater prominence characteristics that rather needed repression. He should have nourished the artistic rather than the intellectual element. Instead, the former dwindled and the latter grew; and some of his later writings may be not unfairly described as merely treatises in verse. Such is Fifine at the Fair (1872); such is La Saisiaz (1878); such are many parts of Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884), and of the Parleyings with Certain People of Importance (1887). Such too is Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871); for there the dramatic conception of Louis Napoleon is smothered beneath the arguments of the Saviour of Society. In all of these the philosophy overloads the poetry, a state of matters all the less satisfactory because the philosophy itself is not so sound as that of the earlier periods.

There is nevertheless some fine work belonging to this late period. The translations from the Greek are interesting; but their value is outweighed by that of the beautiful romance of Balaustion, in which they are set, and by the discussion of the principles of art in Aristophanes’ Apology (1875). Still better is The Inn Album (1875), remarkable for the magnificent character of the heroine, and for some of the most powerful reasoning to be found in Browning’s works. His last volume, Asolando (1889), will always have a special interest for its publication coincidently with his death; and it illustrates how his favourite ideas remained fixed to the end. There is nothing more characteristic of him than the thought that evil is necessary to the evolution of good. We can trace this all through his work. It is present in Sordello, where we find evil described as ‘the scheme by which, through ignorance, good labours to exist;’ and the poet even modifies the prayer, ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ because, if we are strong enough to overcome it, the temptation will only do us good. It is indeed Bishop Blougram whom he causes to speak of ‘the blessed evil;’ but Browning could consistently have used the phrase himself. Nowhere is this doctrine, at first so strange, yet so suggestive, more fully and clearly expressed than in the poem Rephan in Asolando. Earth is superior to Rephan just because evil blended with good is better than ‘a neutral best,’ and it is progress to move from the sphere where wrong is impossible to one where through the risk of evil, and often through evil itself, a higher good may be attained.