The Age of Tennyson

Browning’s last word to the world, the epilogue to Asolando, is most distinctive of his style and tone of thought. He held throughout a steady optimism, all the more cheering because it is the optimism of a man of wide knowledge of the world, and one who has looked evil in the face. The note is never clearer than in the epilogue, where he describes himself as

‘One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,Never doubted clouds would break,Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,Sleep to wake.‘No, at noonday in the bustle of man’s work-timeGreet the unseen with a cheer!Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,Strive and thrive! Cry, “Speed,—fight on, fare everThere as here.”’

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

(1806-1861).

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an author at an earlier date than her husband. As early as 1826 she published a poetical Essay on Mind, along with other pieces; but her first work of any note was The Seraphim (1838). Her introduction to Browning took place in 1846. She was prepared to admire him, for she already admired his work, and had expressed her opinion of it in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship. An accident in girlhood had made her a confirmed invalid; but in spite of this the two poets fell in love, and were married in the autumn of the year when they first met. They left England and settled at Florence for the sake of Mrs. Browning’s health; and there, in 1861, she died.

There are two points of special and peculiar interest in connexion with Mrs. Browning. She has only one possible rival, Christina Rossetti, for the honour of being the greatest poetess who has written in English; and her marriage with Browning formed a union without parallel in literature. Moreover, in relation to Mrs. Browning’s works, sex is not a mere accident. She is a woman in all her modes of thought and feeling, and she is so especially in her very finest work. Her greatest contribution to literature, Sonnets from the Portuguese, derives its unique interest from being the expression of the woman’s love; and A Child’s Grave at Florence could hardly have been written but by a woman and a mother.

Mrs. Browning’s influence upon her husband was remarkably slight; his influence upon her was of mixed effect, but good predominated. The questionable element is seen when we compare The Seraphim with poems like Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Aurora Leigh (1857). The Seraphim, a lyrical drama, though immature, is of high promise. It is, above all, right in tone and method; for the writer, Mrs. Browning, was not really a thinker; woman-like, she felt first, and the attempt to translate her feeling into thought was an error. She was by nature prone to this error, and Browning strengthened her innate ambition. But she never succeeds where thought is suffered to predominate. Casa Guidi Windows is sadly wanting in force and concentration; and the ambitious metrical romance of Aurora Leigh would be much improved by being compressed within half its bulk. It is moreover always the thought, the social discussions, the parts meant to be especially profound, that are wrong; the poetic feeling is sound and just, and its expression is often excellent. Minor influences of Browning may be traced in his wife’s rhymes and rhythms; but while his effects, though often grotesque and uncouth, are striking and memorable, hers are feeble and commonplace.

But if Browning inspired his wife with a false ideal, he, on the other hand, lifted the shadow from her life, and gave her courage and hope, and the measure of health without which her work could not have been accomplished. Her best poems are related to him directly, like the Sonnets from the Portuguese, or indirectly, like A Child’s Grave at Florence; for there her own child is an influence.

Beyond question, the Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) are Mrs. Browning’s most valuable contribution to literature. They are valuable even beyond their intrinsic merits. Good as they are, these sonnets have neither massiveness and subtlety of thought on the one hand, nor melody and charm on the other, sufficient to secure a place beside the greatest poetry. But they are the genuine utterance of a woman’s heart, at once humbled and exalted by love; and in this respect they are unique. The woman’s passion, from the woman’s point of view, has seldom found expression at all in literature, and this particular aspect of it never. Hence, while it would be absurd to say that these sonnets are, as pieces of poetry, equal to the sonnets of Wordsworth or of Milton, it is not so unreasonable to question whether their removal would not leave a more irreparable gap in literature.

Mrs. Browning is on the whole happiest as a sonnet-writer. The sonnet form restrained that tendency to diffuseness which was her besetting sin, and so the fetters proved, as they so often do, to be the means whereby she moved more freely. Her purpose however frequently required the use of other forms. Thus, she sometimes aimed at romantic effects. She did so with no great success in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, a kind of Lord of Burleigh from the other side, spoilt by excessive length. The Rhyme of the Duchess May is much better. The Romaunt of Margret altogether fails to catch the weird effect aimed at, while The Lay of the Brown Rosary succeeds. But apart from the Sonnets from the Portuguese and some of the miscellaneous sonnets, her truest note is pathos. Bertha in the Lane, a simple story, sentimental but not weak, is an example of one aspect of it; A Child’s Grave, already mentioned, of another; and, perhaps highest of all, The Cry of the Children of a third.

Mrs. Browning had a dangerous facility of composition, and much that she wrote is poor. Few poets gain more by selection. A small volume of pieces judiciously chosen would convince the reader that he was listening to the voice of a true and even a great poet; but his sense of this is lost in the flatness and weariness of the five superfluous volumes.

Edward FitzGerald

(1809-1883).

There remains one very remarkable poet, Edward FitzGerald, whom it is difficult to place. Formally, he ought to be classed merely as an interpreter of other men’s thoughts; but in reality he is an original poet of no mean rank, and his friendship with Tennyson, together with the strong intellectual quality of his principal work, gives him an affinity to the group now under discussion. His first noteworthy publication was a fine prose dialogue, Euphranor (1851), but his principal work was the translation of poetry. He translated six dramas of Calderon (1853), the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), Salámán and Absál (1856), and the Agamemnon of Æschylus, which, having been first privately printed, was published anonymously in 1876.

Probably no other translator ever showed equal originality. As a rule, the reader of a version of poetry, even if he be unacquainted with the original, feels a sense of loss. Pope’s Homer is ‘a pretty poem;’ but not only is it not Homer, we feel that it is not worthy of the great reputation of Homer; and there is not one of the numerous versions of Faust but falls far short of the force and suggestiveness of the original. It is not so with FitzGerald. To some extent in the case of all his poems, but eminently in the case of the Rubáiyát, we feel that we are in the presence of a man of native power; and some Persian scholars hold that in this instance the order of merit is reversed, and that FitzGerald is greater than Omar.

That his success was partly due to an inborn gift for rendering verse is proved by FitzGerald’s high, though not equal felicity, as a translator of poets so different as Æschylus, Calderon, and Omar Khayyám. But partly also it was due to a very liberal theory of translation, outlined by himself in the prefaces to Calderon and the Agamemnon. In the former he says, ‘I have, while faithfully trying to retain what was fine and efficient, sunk, reduced, altered, and replaced much that seemed not; simplified some perplexities, and curtailed or omitted scenes that seemed to mar the general effect, supplying such omissions by some lines of after-narrative; and in some measure have tried to compensate for the fulness of sonorous Spanish, which Saxon English at least must forego, by a compression which has its own charms to Saxon ears.’ The extent to which he allowed himself liberties may be partly gauged by the differences between the first and fourth editions of the Rubáiyát. In short, FitzGerald was more properly a paraphrast than a translator. He got into his mind a conception of the central meaning of the work and of the author’s character where, as in the case of Omar, that was of importance as a key to the meaning; and he then, without troubling himself about exact equivalence of word or phrase, or even of whole sections, proceeded to create a similar impression in the new language. Hence his work is wholly free from the impression of cramped movement so common in translations.

With reference to Omar, FitzGerald had first to decide whether his quatrains were to be interpreted literally, or as the utterances of a mystic Sufism, in which the wine so frequently sung of really meant Deity, and all the sensual images covered a spiritual meaning. Fortunately, he decided for the former alternative; and whatever the real Omar may have been, FitzGerald’s Omar is an epicurean. The original Omar has been compared to Lucretius; as FitzGerald represents him he is far more suggestive of Horace. His touch is lighter than the elder Roman’s; and he has no system, nor any ambition to frame one. Rather it is his conviction of the futility of systems that makes him what he is. He is a thoughtful man, questioning the meaning of life, finding no answer except in the philosophy of ‘eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die,’ and drawing thence the inevitable melancholy it must impart to the reflective mind.

‘There was the Door to which I found no Key;There was the Veil through which I might not see;Some little talk awhile of Me and TheeThere was—and then no more of Thee and Me.’

Herein lies the charm of his epicureanism, and herein too its kinship with that of Horace. In both, the moral, carpe diem, is the advice of men who, in spite of themselves, must live for more than the day.

Thanks to the deeply human element in his philosophy, Horace after nineteen centuries is one of the most modern of poets. He has been emphatically the guide of the man of the world, whose experience, as it broadens, more and more convinces him of the poet’s truth. FitzGerald’s Omar has the same modern tone, perhaps in a degree even higher. His necessitarianism is modern, his scepticism is modern, and the difficulties in which it arises are modern too. His stinging quatrains answer a theology familiar enough to the readers of Burns, and seem to breathe the spirit of the Scotch poet’s satires on the Kirk:

‘Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with ginBeset the Road I was to wander in,Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil roundEnmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin!‘Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,And ev’n with Paradise devise the Snake:For all the Sin wherewith the face of ManIs blacken’d—Man’s forgiveness give—and take!’

Except perhaps in America, FitzGerald is not yet appreciated as he ought to be. When he is so appreciated he will rank only under the greatest of his time, and his chief work will be classed little below their best.

CHAPTER XI

POETRY FROM 1850 TO 1870: THE PRE-RAPHAELITES; THE SPASMODIC SCHOOL; MINOR POETS

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

(1828-1882).

Contemporary with the great poets, who seem to feel first of all the imperative necessity of understanding and interpreting the intellectual movement of the age, were others, some of them great too, in whose work passion takes a prior place to intellect. Of these the most talented group were the Pre-Raphaelites, and the greatest man was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The celebrated founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a man who had the rare fortune to be highly distinguished in two arts. Other artists—Thomas Woolner and William Bell Scott and Sir Joseph Noel Paton are contemporary examples—have been poets also; but no one has attained a level at once as high and as equal in both as Rossetti. He has also been influential upon others in a degree rare even among men of as great calibre; and finally, he was only the greatest of a family all highly gifted in literature.

Rossetti, though English by birth, was more Italian than English by blood, and he was brought up in an atmosphere largely Italian. Both his literary and his artistic talents showed themselves early. The literary organ of the Pre-Raphaelites, The Germ, received some of his earliest writings; but he had begun to compose even earlier, the two well-known pieces, The Blessed Damozel and My Sister’s Sleep, having both been written in his nineteenth year. The greater part of his poetry was composed in early manhood. On the death of his wife, in 1862, Rossetti, in the transport of his grief, buried the MSS. in her coffin. They were exhumed in 1869 and published under the simple title of Poems in 1870. After his wife’s death Rossetti for a long time wrote little poetry, though he continued his artistic work. In later years the complete breakdown of his health checked his production. He suffered from insomnia and attempted to cure it by the use of chloral, with the usual result. Nevertheless, some very fine pieces, notably The King’s Tragedy, are of late composition. The later poems were gathered together in the Ballads and Sonnets of 1881. Rossetti was also a translator, and in 1861 had published, under the title of The Early Italian Poets, the collection now known as Dante and his Circle. He likewise occasionally wrote prose, his most considerable work being a story, poetical in spirit, entitled Hand and Soul.

Mr. W. D. Howells (quoted in Sharp’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti) says it will always be a question whether Rossetti ‘had not better have painted his poems and written his pictures; there is so much that is purely sensuous in the former and so much that is intellectual in the latter.’ There is certainly an element of truth in this judgment. The sensuousness was the cause of the celebrated attack entitled The Fleshly School of Poetry, which was met by Rossetti’s effective rejoinder, The Stealthy School of Criticism. The poet showed that the attack was in great measure unjust, but he would not have sought to deny that there was sensuousness in his poetry. He would have held, on the contrary, that poetry not only might legitimately be, but ought to be, sensuous. This conception influenced Rossetti’s whole style of poetical portraiture. We see its effect in the fine description of a girl in A Last Confession, beginning, ‘She had a mouth made to bring death to life.’ It is all so written that from it the painter could easily put the portrait on canvas.

But with respect to the allegation of sensuousness, the question for criticism is one of degree. There are two aspects of it, the moral and the artistic, which, though not entirely distinct, are best treated apart. Rossetti’s answer was most successful upon the moral side, though even in this respect there remained one or two pieces not easily justified. From the artistic point of view, it must be said that the sensuousness is sometimes so great as to blur the intellectual outlines. We see this particularly in the sonnets, which many regard as Rossetti’s best work in poetry. He certainly does put into the sonnet a fulness of melody and a wealth of colour not surpassed and perhaps, in their conjunction, hardly equalled in the language. But when we ask if the idea of the sonnet stands out with due clearness, the answer must be in the negative. In the best sonnets of Milton and Wordsworth, and in a less degree in those of Drummond of Hawthornden, of Mrs. Browning and of Christina Rossetti, the idea is precise and definite. Dante Rossetti is a poet who ‘deals in meanings,’ but he sometimes darkens, if he does not altogether bury, the meaning under a wealth of sonorous words. The fault of over-elaboration, which is chargeable also against the pictorial art of the Pre-Raphaelites, is visible here. We see it in other aspects too. The sense of spontaneity is lost; the poet seems to be perpetually aiming at a mark just beyond his reach; and there is an excessive addiction to some of the subordinate artifices of verse. Among these Rossetti’s favourite is alliteration; and the reader is not infrequently troubled with the suspicion that a word is used, not because it is the best, but because it begins with a particular letter.

A defect kindred in origin, but more serious, is shown in Rossetti’s treatment of nature. One of his best poems of this class is The Stream’s Secret. The poet certainly wrote it ‘with his eye on the object,’ for the stream in question was no figment of the brain, but the Penwhapple in Ayrshire. All the more for that reason it illustrates the difference between inspiration and conscientious study. Rossetti did not feel natural beauty like Wordsworth, and his descriptions have not the easy grace of the true poet of nature. He deliberately set out to make a poem, with the result that he produced a fine piece of skilled workmanship.

Next perhaps to Rossetti’s reputation as a writer of sonnets stands his reputation as a balladist; and it may be questioned whether the order ought not to be reversed. Rossetti’s art was far too elaborate for a ballad of the genuine old type. Even in The White Ship there is a note which distinguishes it not only from the true popular ballad, but from such approximations as the ballads of Scott. But poetry ought to be valued for what it is, not for conformity with what may possibly be a misleading standard; and Rossetti’s ballads are noble poetry. He imbibed enough of the ballad spirit to check his habitual faults, and of all his compositions the ballads are the simplest and most natural. The universal favourite, The King’s Tragedy is a grand story told with great fire and energy. So, too, Rose Mary is a powerful and beautiful poem, less uniform however than The King’s Tragedy, for the lyrics between the parts are at best second-rate. It is in pieces like these, and in some of the more clearly-thought sonnets, like Lost Days, that Rossetti proves himself the true poet. The more deeply sensuous sonnets, and such characteristic pieces as The Blessed Damozel, are representative rather of the dangers and defects of his poetry.

Christina Georgina Rossetti

(1830-1894).

Less great but hardly less interesting than her brother was Christina Georgina Rossetti, who, like him, wrote for The Germ, though she published no volume of poems for many years afterwards. Though her course extends far beyond the limits of the period, the poetical work for which she is most memorable was chiefly done within it, and her closest connexions belong to it too. Her first published volume was Goblin Market, and other Poems (1862); her second, The Prince’s Progress, and other Poems (1866). Then, after some prose tales, came the book of nursery rhymes, Sing-Song (1872). From this time onwards, except for A Pageant, and other Poems (1881), Miss Rossetti’s books were chiefly of a devotional character; but one of them, Time Flies (1885), contains some of the finest of her verse.

The religious poems form a most important section of Christina Rossetti’s works. She is one of the most profoundly devotional of modern writers. Unlike Arnold and Clough, she is not a poet of doubt but of faith; unlike Browning’s, her creed is rather a creed of feeling than of intellect. But while she is not touched with the doubt of the age she is touched with its sadness. Her devotional pieces have sometimes, as in Advent, the ring of conquering faith, but more often they have in them something of a wail. What Dr. John Brown called the ‘inevitable melancholy’ of women seems to find a voice in Christina Rossetti; and though she is bound by her faith to an ultimately optimistic view, her habitual tone of mind is gloomy. ‘Vanity of vanities’ is the title of her finest sonnet, and it is also the conclusion she draws from the life of this world.

One of the praiseworthy points of Christina Rossetti’s work is that, while invariably imaginative, it never fails to be clear. In this respect she far surpasses her brother. The marks of the artist’s chisel are, as we have seen, too conspicuous in his work; in hers they are invisible. Yet few writers are more carefully artistic than she. Less ambitious in her aims than Dante Rossetti, her work impresses the reader with its adequacy to those aims. Herein she has an advantage over Mrs. Browning also. The latter has produced a far greater body of work, and at her best writes with far more strength than Miss Rossetti; but on the other hand Miss Rossetti is free from those astonishing lapses into bathos or triviality or mere bad taste which disfigure Mrs. Browning’s poetry. The two poetesses meet most closely in their respective series of sonnets—Monna Innominata and the Sonnets from the Portuguese. These are among the masterpieces of each, for both were peculiarly happy in the sonnet form; Christina Rossetti because she was an artist by nature, Mrs. Browning probably because the form compelled her to be an artist. The comparison is unquestionably in favour of Mrs. Browning. The Sonnets from the Portuguese are richer and deeper than Monna Innominata. They record a love actually felt; and they are the product of an intellect wider, though perhaps less fine than Christina Rossetti’s. But as regards the form, it is by no means clear that the advantage lies with the elder writer. Mrs. Browning’s sonnets are sometimes laboured in expression; Christina Rossetti’s have an inimitable ease, all the more delightful because in modern poetry it is rare. Her beautifully pure style is one of her greatest merits; and it is also one of the most striking points of contrast between her and her brother. A sonorous richness is characteristic of his style, a fine simplicity of hers. This simplicity, and the fineness of touch and delicacy of taste which accompanied it, served her well in those poems of the supernatural where her imaginative flight is highest. She is a mistress in the fairy realm, and in its own class Goblin Market is unsurpassed.

William Edmondstoune Aytoun

(1813-1865).

Another school which sprang up about the middle of the century, taking its rise in the longing for something deeper and more satisfying than had been recently in vogue, was that nicknamed ‘the Spasmodic.’ The name was fixed upon the school by the extremely clever satirist of it, William Edmondstoune Aytoun, himself a poet of a very different family, that of Scott. Aytoun is best known from his Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers (1848), narratives of martial exploit and tragic sorrow written in animated but excessively rhetorical verse. He was also, in conjunction with Mr. (afterwards Sir) Theodore Martin, the author of the Bon Gaultier Ballads (1845), one of the most amusing collections of comic verse of this century. His satire of the Spasmodic School is contained in Firmilian (1854), a mock-serious piece purporting to be by a member of the school. It was at the time customary to say that Aytoun had killed the Spasmodic School. If he had done so he would hardly have deserved well of literature. But though it is true that the Spasmodic Poets shot up like a rocket only to come down like the spent stick, both the rise and the fall were due partly to whims of popular taste, while the main cause of the fall lay in defects of the writers which satire did not make and could do little to remedy. On the whole, Firmilian was more likely to have helped the school than to have hurt it if it had contained in itself the seeds of long life. But the name ‘spasmodic’ was only too accurately descriptive of more than its style,—unfortunately so, for both the chief members, Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith, possessed talents for poetry in some respects very high.