A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

With some of the causes of this odium we are fortunately here dispensed from dealing. Theological and political matters, in so far as they are controversial, are altogether outside of our scope. The question of the dealing with Carlyle's "Remains" is one rather of ethics than of literature proper, and it is perhaps sufficient to make, in reference to it, the warning observation that Lockhart, who is now considered by almost all competent critics as a very pattern of the union of fidelity and good taste towards both his subject and his readers, was accused, at the appearance of his book, of treachery towards Scott.

But it must be confessed that if Mr. Froude's critics were unfair (and they certainly were) he himself gave only too abundant opening to fair criticism. That his first great book (not perhaps any of his others) was planned on an unduly large scale, and indulged in far too extensive dissertation, divagation, and so forth, was rather the fault of his time than of himself. Grote and Macaulay had obtained, the first considerable, the latter immense popularity by similar prolixity; and Carlyle was about, in the Frederick, to follow the fashion. But whereas all these three, according to the information open to them, were and are among the most painfully laborious researchers and, with a fair allowance, the most faithful recorders among historians, Mr. Froude displayed an attention to accuracy which his warmest admirers must allow to be sadly, and which enemies asserted to be scandalously insufficient. He has been called by well-affected critics "congenitally inaccurate," and there is warrant for it. Nor did any one of his three great models come short of him in partiality, in advocacy, in the determination to make the reader accept his own view first of all.

He was, in the earlier part of his career at any rate, a very poor man, whereas Macaulay was in easy, and Grote in affluent circumstances, and he had not Carlyle's Scotch thrift. But the carelessness of his dealing with documents had more in it than lack of pence to purchase assistance, or even than lack of dogged resolve to do the drudgery himself. His enemies of course asserted, or hinted, that the added cause was dishonesty at the worst, indifference to truth at the best. As far as dishonesty goes they may be summarily non-suited. The present writer once detected, in a preface of Mr. Froude's to a book with which the introducer was thoroughly in sympathy, repeated errors of quotation or allusion which actually weakened Mr. Froude's own argument – cases where he made his own case worse by miscitation. To the very last, in his Erasmus itself, which he had prepared at some pains for the press, his work would always abound in the most astonishing slips of memory, oversights of fact, hastinesses of statement. There is probably no historian of anything like his calibre in the whole history of literature who is so dangerous to trust for mere matters of fact, who gives such bad books of reference, who is so little to be read with implicit confidence in detail. Had his critics confined themselves to pointing this out, and done him justice in his other and real merits, little fault could have been found with them. But it is impossible not to see that these merits were, at least in some cases, part of his crime, in the eyes of those who did not like him; in others were of a kind which their natural abilities did not qualify them to detect.

The first of these merits – the least it may be in some eyes, not so in others – was a steadfast, intense, fiery patriotism, which may remind us of that which Macaulay in a famous passage has ascribed to Chatham in modern times and to Demosthenes of old. This quality differed as much from the flowery and conventional rhetoric not uncommon in writers of some foreign nations, as from the smug self-satisfaction which was so frequent in English speakers and authors of his own earlier time. No one probably of Mr. Froude's day was less blind to English faults than he was; no one more thoroughly grasped and more ardently admired the greatness of England, or more steadfastly did his utmost in his own vocation to keep her great.

His second excellence – an excellence still contested and in a way contestable, but less subject than the first to personal and particular opinion – was his command of the historic grasp, his share of the historic sense. I have seen these terms referred to as if they were chatter or claptrap; while the qualities which they denote are very often confounded with qualities which, sometimes found in connection with them, may exist without either. The historic sense may be roughly described as the power of seizing, and so of portraying, a historic character, incident, or period as if it were alive not dead; in such a manner that the fit reader, whether he is convinced or not that the things ever did happen, sees that they might and probably must have happened. Some of the most estimable and excellent of historians have not had even a glimmering of this sense: they have at best laboriously assembled the materials out of which, sooner or later, some one with the sense will make a live history. But Thucydides and Herodotus had it; Tacitus had it, and even Sallust; it betrays itself in the most artless fashion in Villehardouin and Joinville, less artlessly in Comines; Clarendon had it; Gibbon had it; Carlyle had it as none has had it before or since. And Mr. Froude had it; not much less though more fitfully than Carlyle. It is not in the least necessary to agree with his views; it is possible to regard his facts with the most anxious suspicion. You may think that the case made out for King Henry is pretty weak, and the case made out against Queen Mary is much weaker. But Mr. Froude is among the rare Deucalions of historic literature: he cannot cast a stone but it becomes alive.

Thirdly, and still rising in the scale of incontestability, though even so contested, I believe, by some, is the merit of style. I have sometimes doubted whether Mr. Froude at his best has any superior among the prose writers of the last half of this century. His is not a catching style; and in particular it does not perhaps impress itself upon green tastes. It has neither the popular and slightly brusque appeal of Macaulay or Kinglake, nor the unique magnificence of Mr. Ruskin, nor the fretted and iridescent delicacy of some other writers. It must be frankly confessed that, the bulk of his work being very great and his industry not being untiring, it is unequal, and sometimes not above (it is never below) good journey-work. But at its best it is of a simply wonderful attraction – simply in the pure sense, for it is never very ornate, and does not proceed in point of "tricks" much beyond the best varieties of the latest Georgian form. That strange quality of "liveliness" which has been noticed in reference to its author's view of history, animates it throughout. It is never flat; never merely popular; never merely scholarly; never merely "precious" and eccentric. And at its very best it is excelled by no style in this century, and approached by few in this or any other, as a perfect harmony of unpretentious music, adjusted to the matter that it conveys, and lingering on the ear that it reaches.

Note. – As examples of the almost enforced omissions referred to in the text may be mentioned earlier Archdeacon Coxe, the biographer of Marlborough and the historian of the House of Austria; later, Finlay (1799-1875), the valiant successor of Gibbon, and the chronicler of the obscure and thankless fortunes of the country called Greece, after it had ceased to be living. Professor Sir J. R. Seeley, Kingsley's successor at Cambridge (1834-94), equally distinguished in his professional business, and as a lay theologian in a sense rather extra-orthodox than unorthodox; and Sir John Stirling-Maxwell, no mean historian either in the general sense or in the special department of Art. It is open to any one to contend that each and all of these as well deserve notice as not a few dealt with above; yet if they were admitted others still could hardly be excluded.

CHAPTER VI

THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD

The second period of English poetry in the nineteenth century displays a variety and abundance of poetical accomplishment which must rank it very little below either its immediate predecessor, or even the great so-called Elizabethan era. But it is distinguished from both these periods, and, indeed, from almost all others by the extraordinary predominance of a single poet in excellence, in influence, and in duration. There is probably no other instance anywhere of a poet who for more than sixty years wrote better poetry than any one of his contemporaries who were not very old men when he began, and for exactly fifty of those years was recognised by the best judges as the chief poet of his country if not of his time.

Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809 at Somersby, in Lincolnshire, where his father, a member of a good county family, was rector. He was the third son, and his two elder brothers, Frederick and Charles, both possessed considerable poetical gifts, though it cannot be said that the Poems by Two Brothers (it seems that it should really have been "three"), which appeared in 1826, display much of this or anything whatever of Alfred's subsequent charm. From the Grammar School of Louth the poet went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was contemporary, and in most cases intimate, with an unusually distinguished set of undergraduates, many of whom afterwards figured in the famous Sterling Club (see chapter iv). He also did what not many great future poets have done, he obtained the Chancellor's prize for English verse with a poem on "Timbuctoo," where again his special note is almost, though perhaps not quite, absent: it appears faintly and fitfully in another juvenile poem not formally published till long afterwards, "The Lover's Tale."

It was in 1830 that he made his first substantive appearance with a book of Poems. This volume was afterwards subjected to a severe handling by the poet in the way of revision and omission – processes which through life he continued with such perseverance and rigour, that the final critical edition of him, when it appears, will be one of the most complicated of the kind in English literature. So did he also with another which appeared two years (or a little more) later. It is not therefore quite just to judge the criticism which these books received, by the present condition of the poems which figured in them; for though most of the beauties were there then, they were accompanied by many defects which are not there now. Criticism, however, was undoubtedly unfavourable, and even unfair. Although Tennyson was not, either at this time or at any other, a party politician, the two great Tory periodicals, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine, were still animated, the former by a dislike to the Romantic school in poetry, the latter by a dislike to "Cockneys" – though how anybody could have discovered a Cockney in Tennyson may seem marvellous enough. Accordingly Lockhart in the one and Wilson in the other fell foul (though in Wilson's case, at least, not indiscriminately) of work which beyond all question offered very numerous and very convenient handles, in ways which will be mentioned presently, to merely carping criticism. Some attempts at reply were made by the poet's friends, notably A. H. Hallam, but the public did not take to him, and even well-affected and competent older judges, such as Coleridge, expressed very qualified admiration.

But during the next decade, in which he gave himself up silently to the task of perfecting his art, attempting no profession or literary occupation of profit, and living (partly in London, partly in the country at High Beach and elsewhere) with extreme simplicity and economy on his own small means and a pension which was provided for him, the leaven of an almost fanatical admiration was spreading among readers of his own age or a little younger. And his next publication, a new issue of Poems in 1842 – containing the final selection and revision of the others already mentioned, and a large reinforcement of admirable work – was received, not indeed with the popular avidity which had been displayed towards Scott and Byron in the generation before, and which revived in the case of his own later work, but with an immense enjoyment by almost all true lovers of poetry. Even Wordsworth, the most ungracious critic of other men's work in his own art of whom the history of literature gives record, acknowledged Tennyson in the amplest terms.

This was, as has been hinted above, exactly fifty years before his death, and though in the first of these five decades the pudding if not the praise was still rather scanty, his reputation waxed steadily and never waned. To keep for the present to chronicle in biography and bibliography, he published in 1847 the exquisite "medley" of The Princess, his first attempt at a poem of any length. 1850 was a great year in his career, for in it he published the collection of elegiacs on his friend Arthur Hallam, in which some have seen his most perfect work, and he became Poet Laureate. Three years later he bought a house at Farringford, near Freshwater in the Isle of Wight, which was for the rest of his life his occasional and, until 1870 (when to avoid intrusion he built himself another at Aldworth near Haslemere), his main house. His poetry now was beginning to bring in some profit, the editions of it multiplying every year; and during the last thirty years of his life, if not more, he was probably at least as richly provided with mere gold as any poet has ever been. He was, however, never seduced into hasty writing; and he never gave himself to any other occupation save poetry, while during his entire life he was a hater of what is commonly called society. In 1855 there appeared Maud, the reception of which seemed at first something of a relapse in welcome, which was in its first form open to some criticism, and which he touched up to one of the finest as a whole, as it was in parts one of the most passionate and melodious of his works. But the Idylls of the King, the first and best instalment of which appeared in 1858, completely revived even his popular vogue, and made him indeed popular as no poet had been since Byron. It was said at the time that 17,000 copies of Enoch Arden, his next volume (1864), were sold on the morning of publication.

For the rest of his life his issues were pretty frequent, though the individual volumes were never large. A series of dramas beginning with Queen Mary in 1875, and continuing through Harold, The Falcon, The Cup, the unlucky Promise of May, Becket, and The Foresters, though fine enough for any other man, could be better spared by his critical admirers than any other portion of his works. But the volumes of poems proper, which appeared between 1864 and his death, Lucretius, Tiresias, the successive instalments of the Idylls, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, Demeter, The Death of [OE]none, and perhaps above all the splendid Ballads of 1880, never failed to contain with matter necessarily of varying excellence things altogether incomparable – one of the last, the finest and fortunately also the most popular, being the famous "Crossing the Bar," which appeared in his penultimate, but last not posthumous, volume in 1889. He died at Aldworth in October 1892, and was buried with an unequalled solemnity in Westminster Abbey.

In the case of no English poet is it more important and interesting than in the case of Tennyson, considering the excellence of his own work in the first place, and the altogether unparalleled extent of his influence in the second, to trace the nature and character of his poetical quality. Nor is this difficult, though strange to say it has not always been done. In his very earliest work, so soon as this quality appeared at all, it is to be discovered side by side with other things which are not native. Undoubtedly the tradition which, in the general filiation of English poetry, connects Tennyson with Keats, is not wholly wrong. In many of the weaker things, and not a few of the better, of the volumes of 1830 and 1832, there is to be seen both the wonderful music which Keats attained by a combination of the classical and romantic appeals – the appeals which in his own case are singly exhibited at their best in the "Grecian Urn" and in "La Belle Dame sans Merci," – and the sometimes faulty and illegitimate means which Keats took to produce this effect. But to any one who compares rationally (and it may be permitted to remark parenthetically, that nothing seems to be more misunderstood than the comparative point of view) the difference between Keats and Tennyson will emerge at once. Both being great poets, there is the inexplicable in both; while as Keats undoubtedly died before he had any chance of applying to his own powers and products the unequalled process of clarifying and self-criticism which went on with Tennyson in the ten years' silence between the second of the volumes just mentioned and his issue of 1842, it is impossible to say that Keats himself could not have done something similar. Nothing that he ever did is worse in point of "gush," of undisciplined fluency, of mistakes in point of taste and of other defects than the notorious piece about "the darling little room," on which the future Poet Laureate's critics were so justly severe; while in the single point of passion it is very doubtful whether Tennyson ever approached the author of "La Belle Dame sans Merci." There was not perhaps much to choose between the two in their natural power of associating pictorial with musical expression; while both had that gift of simple humanity, of plain honest healthy understanding of common things, the absence of which gives to Shelley – in some ways a greater poet than either of them – a certain unearthliness and unreality.

But Tennyson had from the first a wider range of interest and capacity than Keats, and he had the enormous advantage of thorough and regular literary training. No poet ever improved his own work as Tennyson did; nor has any, while never allowing his genius to be daunted by self-comparison with his predecessors, had such a faculty of availing himself of what they had done without copying, of seeing what they had not done and supplying the gap himself. And besides this he had the inexplicable, the incommunicable, the unique, the personal gift. In the very earliest things, in "Claribel," in "Mariana," in the "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," in the "Ode to Memory," in the "Dirge," in the "Dying Swan," in "Oriana," there is even to those who were born long after they were written, even to those who have for years sedulously compared them with almost all things before and with all things since, the unmistakable note of the new, of the new that never can be old. It is there in the rhythms, it is there in the phrase. The poet may take things that had previously existed – the Keatsian and Shelleian lyric, the Wordsworthian attitude to Nature, the Miltonic blank verse; but inevitably, invariably, each under his hands becomes different, becomes individual and original. The result cannot be accounted for by mannerisms, from which at no time was Tennyson free, and after the thousands and ten thousands of imitations which have been seen since, it stands out untouched, unrivalled.

In the next instalment this quality of intense poetical individuality strengthened and deepened. As we read "The Two Voices," "[OE]none," "The Palace of Art," "The Lotos Eaters," "A Dream of Fair Women," it becomes almost incomprehensible how any one who ever read them even in forms less perfect than those that we possess, should have mistaken their incomparable excellence. But the student of literary history knows better. He knows that nearly always the poet has to create his audience, that he sings before the dawn of the day in which he is to be sovereign.

And then with the 1842 book came practically the completion of Tennyson in the sense of the indication of his powers. Edward FitzGerald, as is elsewhere noticed, thought, or at least said, that everything his friend had done after this was more or less a declension. This is a common and not an ignoble Fallacy of Companionship – the delusion of those who have hailed and accompanied a poet or a prophet in his early struggles. It is not even wholly a fallacy, inasmuch as, in the case of the class of poets to which Tennyson belongs, there does come a time when the rest of the products of their genius is so to speak applied: it ceases to reveal them in new aspects. They do not repeat themselves; but they chiefly vary. Now came the magnificent "Morte D'Arthur" (the "Idylls of the King" in microcosm, with all their merits and none of their defects), "St. Simeon Stylites," "Ulysses," "Locksley Hall," "St. Agnes' Eve," and other exquisite things; while to this period, as the subsequent arrangement shows, belong not a few, such as "Tithonus" and "The Voyage," which were not actually published till later, and in which keen observers at the time of their publication detected as it were an older ring, a more genuine and unblended vintage.

It is not improper therefore to break off here for a moment and to endeavour to state – leaving out the graces that can never be stated, and are more important than all the others – the points in which this new excellence of Tennyson differed from the excellences of his forerunners. One of them, not the least important, but the least truly original, because something distantly resembling it had been seen before in Keats and Shelley, is the combined application of pictorial and musical handling. Not, of course, that all poets had not endeavoured to depict their subjects vividly and to arrange the picture in a melodious frame of sound, not that the best of them had not also endeavoured to convey, if it were possible, the colours into the sense, the sense into the music. But partly as a result of the natural development and acquired practice of the language, partly for the very reason that the arts both of painting and music had themselves made independent progress, most of all, perhaps, because Tennyson was the first poet in English of the very greatest genius who dared not to attempt work on the great scale, but put into short pieces (admitting, of course, of infinite formal variety) what most of his forerunners would have spun into long poems – the result here is, as a rule, far in advance of those forerunners in this respect, and as an exception on a level with the very best of their exceptions. With Shakespeare there is no comparison; Shakespeare can send to every poet an "O of Giotto" in his own style to which that poet must bow. But of others only Spenser had hitherto drawn such pictures as those of the "Palace" and the "Dream," and Spenser had done them in far less terse fashion than Tennyson. Only Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Blake, perhaps Beddoes, and a few Elizabethans had poured into the veins of language the ineffable musical throb of a score of pieces from "Claribel" to "Break! Break!" and not one of them had done it in quite the same way. Only Milton, with Thomson as a far distant second, had impressed upon non-dramatic blank verse such a swell and surge as that of "[OE]none." And about all these different kinds and others there clung and rang a peculiar dreamy slow music which was heard for the first time, and which has never been reproduced, – a music which in "The Lotos Eaters," impossible as it might have seemed, adds a new charm after the Faerie Queen, after the Castle of Indolence, after the Revolt of Islam to the Spenserian stanza, which makes the stately verses of the "Palace" and the "Dream" tremble and cry with melodious emotion, and which accomplishes the miracle of the poet's own dying swan in a hundred other poems all "flooded over with eddying song."

But there is something more to be noted still. The poet had caught and was utilising the spirit of his time in two ways, one of them almost entirely new. That he constantly sang the subjective view of nature may be set down to the fact that he came after Wordsworth, though the fact that he sang it without the Wordsworthian dryness and dulness must be set down to his own credit. But in that sense of the history of former times which is perhaps the chief glory of the nineteenth century in matters of thought he had been anticipated by no one. He might not have attained it without Scott and Byron, but his expression of it was hardly conditioned in the very slightest degree by the expression either of Byron or of Scott. They were not in strictness men of the nineteenth century; he was, and he represented the very best features of his time in attending, from its point of view mainly, to the features of better times.