Literary and General Lectures and Essays

And what becomes of artistic form in the hands of such a school?  Just what was to be expected.  It is impossible to give outward form to that which is in its very nature formless, like doubt and discontent.  For on such subjects thought itself is not defined; it has no limit, no self-coherence, not even method or organic law.  And in a poem, as in all else, the body must be formed according to the law of the inner life; the utterance must be the expression, the outward and visible antetype of the spirit which animates it.  But where the thought is defined by no limits, it cannot express itself in form, for form is that which has limits.  Where it has no inward unity it cannot have any outward one.  If the spirit be impatient of all moral rule, its utterance will be equally impatient of all artistic rule; and thus, as we are now beginning to discover from experience, the poetry of doubt will find itself unable to use those forms of verse which have been always held to be the highest—tragedy, epic, the ballad, and lastly, even the subjective lyrical ode.  For they, too, to judge by every great lyric which remains to us, require a groundwork of consistent self-coherent belief; and they require also an appreciation of melody even more delicate, and a verbal polish even more complete than any other form of poetic utterance.  But where there is no melody within, there will be no melody without.  It is in vain to attempt the setting of spiritual discords to physical music.  The mere practical patience and self-restraint requisite to work out rhythm when fixed on, will be wanting; nay, the fitting rhythm will never be found, the subject itself being arhythmic; and thus we shall have, or, rather, alas! do have, a wider and wider divorce of sound and sense, a greater and greater carelessness for polish, and for the charm of musical utterance, and watch the clear and spirit-stirring melodies of the older poets swept away by a deluge of half-metrical prose-run-mad, diffuse, unfinished, unmusical, to which any other metre than that in which it happens to have been written would have been equally appropriate, because all are equally inappropriate.  Where men have nothing to sing, it is not of the slightest consequence how they sing it.

While poets persist in thinking and writing thus, it is in vain for them to talk loud about the poet’s divine mission, as the prophet of mankind, the swayer of the universe, and so forth.  Not that we believe the poet simply by virtue of being a singer to have any such power.  While young gentlemen are talking about governing heaven and earth by verse, Wellingtons and Peels, Arkwrights and Stephensons, Frys, and Chisholms, are doing it by plain practical prose; and even of those who have moved and led the hearts of men by verse, every one, as far as we know, has produced his magical effects by poetry of the very opposite forum to that which is now in fashion.  What poet ever had more influence than Homer?  What poet is more utterly antipodal to our modern schools?  There are certain Hebrew psalms, too, which will be confessed, even by those who differ most from them, to have exercised some slight influence on human thought and action, and to be likely to exercise the same for some time to come.  Are they any more like our modern poetic forms than they are like our modern poetic matter?  Ay, even in our own time, what has been the form, what the temper, of all poetry, from Körner and Heine, which has made the German heart leap up, but simplicity, manhood, clearness, finished melody, the very opposite, in a word, of our new school?  And to look at home, what is the modern poetry which lives on the lips and in the hearts of Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen?  It is not only simple in form and language, but much of it fitted, by a severe exercise of artistic patience, to tunes already existing.  Who does not remember how the “Marseillaise” was born, or how Burns’s “Scots wha ha’ wi’ Wallace bled,” or the story of Moore’s taking the old “Red Fox March,” and giving it a new immortality as “Let Erin remember the days of old,” while poor Emmett sprang up and cried, “Oh, that I had twenty thousand Irishmen marching to that tune!”  So it is, even to this day, and let those who hanker after poetic fame take note of it; not a poem which is now really living but has gained its immortality by virtue of simplicity and positive faith.

Let the poets of the new school consider carefully Wolfe’s “Sir John Moore,” Campbell’s “Hohenlinden,” “Mariners of England,” and “Rule Britannia,” Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” and “Bridge of Sighs,” and then ask themselves, as men who would be poets: Were it not better to have written any one of those glorious lyrics than all which John Keats has left behind him?  And let them be sure that, howsoever they may answer the question to themselves, the sound heart of the English people has already made its choice; and that when that beautiful “Hero and Leander,” in which Hood has outrivalled the conceit-mongers at their own weapons, by virtue of the very terseness, clearness, and manliness which they neglect, has been gathered to the limbo of the Crashawes and Marinos, his “Song of the Shirt” and his “Bridge of Sighs” will be esteemed by great new English nations far beyond the seas, for what they are—two of the most noble lyric poems ever written by an English pen.  If our poetasters talk with Wordsworth of the dignity and pathos of the commonest human things, they will find them there in perfection; if they talk about the cravings of the new time, they will find them there.  If they want the truly sublime and the awful, they will find them there also.  But they will find none of their own favourite concetti; hardly even a metaphor; no taint of this new poetic diction into which we have now fallen, after all our abuse of the far more manly and sincere “poetic diction” of the eighteenth century; they will find no loitering by the way to argue and moralise, and grumble at Providence, and show off the author’s own genius and sensibility; they will find, in short, two real works of art, earnest, melodious, self-forgetful, knowing clearly what they want to say, and saying it in the shortest, the simplest, the calmest, the most finished words.  Saying it!—rather taught to say it.  For if that “divine inspiration of poets,” of which the poetasters make such rash and irreverent boastings, have indeed, as all ages have held, any reality corresponding to it, it will rather be bestowed on such works as these, appeals from unrighteous man to a righteous God, than on men whose only claim to celestial help seems to be that mere passionate sensibility, which our modern Draco once described when speaking of poor John Keats, as an infinite hunger after all manner of pleasant things, crying to the universe: ‘Oh that thou wert one great lump of sugar, that I might suck thee!’”

Our task is ended.  We have given as plainly as we can our reasons for the opinion which this magazine has expressed several times already, that with the exception of Mr. Allingham, our young poets are a very hopeless generation, and will so continue unless they utterly repent and amend.  If they do not choose to awaken themselves from within, all that is left for us is to hope that they may be awakened from without, or by some radical revulsion in public taste be shown their own real value and durability, and compelled to be true and manly under pain of being laughed at and forgotten.  A general war might, amid all its inevitable horrors, sweep away at once the dyspeptic unbelief, the insincere bigotry, the effeminate frivolity which now paralyses our poetry as much as it does our action, and strike from England’s heart a lightning flash of noble deeds, a thunder peal of noble song.  Such a case is neither an impossible nor a far-fetched one; let us not doubt that by some other means if not by that, the immense volume of thought and power which is still among us will soon find its utterance, and justify itself to after ages by showing in harmonious and self-restrained poetry its kinship to the heroic and the beautiful of every age and clime.  And till then, till the sunshine and the thaw shall come, and the spring flowers burst into bud and bloom, heralding a new golden year in the world’s life, let us even be content with our pea-green and orange fungi; nay, even admire them as not without their own tawdry beauty, their clumsy fitness; for after all, they are products of nature, though only of her dyspepsia; and grow and breed—as indeed cutaneous disorders do—by an organic law of their own; fulfilling their little destiny, and then making, according to Professor Way, by no means bad manure.  And so we take our leave of Mr. Alexander Smith, entreating him, if these pages meet his eye, to consider three things, namely, that in as far as he has written poetry, he is on the road to ruin by reason of following the worst possible models.  That in as far as the prevailing taste has put these models before him, he is neither to take much blame to himself, nor to be in anywise disheartened for the future.  That in as far as he shall utterly reverse his whole poetic method, whether in morals or in æsthetics, leave undone all that he has done, and do all that he has not done, he will become, what he evidently, by grace of God, can become if he will, namely, a lasting and a good poet.

TENNYSON 4

Critics cannot in general be too punctilious in their respect for an incognito.  If an author intended us to know his name, he would put it on his title-page.  If he does not choose to do that, we have no more right to pry into his secret than we have to discuss his family affairs or open his letters.  But every rule has its exceptional cases; and the book which stands first upon our list is surely such.  All the world, somehow or other, knows the author.  His name has been mentioned unhesitatingly by several reviews already, whether from private information, or from the certainty which every well-read person must feel that there is but one man in England possessed at once of poetic talent and artistic experience sufficient for so noble a creation.  We hope, therefore, that we shall not be considered impertinent if we ignore an incognito which all England has ignored before us, and attribute “In Memoriam” to the pen of the author of “The Princess.”

Such a course will probably be the more useful one to our readers; for this last work of our only living great poet seems to us at once the culmination of all his efforts and the key to many difficulties in his former writings.  Heaven forbid that we should say that it completes the circle of his powers.  On the contrary, it gives us hope of broader effort in new fields of thought and forms of art.  But it brings the development of his Muse and of his Creed to a positive and definite point.  It enables us to claim one who has been hitherto regarded as belonging to a merely speculative and peirastic school as the willing and deliberate champion of vital Christianity, and of an orthodoxy the more sincere because it has worked upward through the abyss of doubt; the more mighty for good because it justifies and consecrates the æsthetics and the philosophy of the present age.  We are sure, moreover, that the author, whatever right reasons he may have had for concealing his own name, would have no quarrel against us for alluding to it, were he aware of the idolatry with which every utterance of his is regarded by the cultivated young men of our day, especially at the universities, and of the infinite service of which this “In Memoriam” may be to them, if they are taught by it that their superiors are not ashamed of faith, and that they will rise instead of falling, fulfil instead of denying the cravings of their hearts and intellects, if they will pass upwards with their teacher from the vague though noble expectations of “Locksley Hall,” to the assured and everlasting facts of the proem to “In Memoriam”—in our eyes the noblest Christian poem which England has produced for two centuries.

To explain our meaning, it will be necessary, perhaps, to go back to Mr. Tennyson’s earlier writings, of which he is said to be somewhat ashamed now—a fastidiousness with which we will not quarrel; for it should be the rule of the poet, forgetting those things which are behind, to press on to those things which are before, and “to count not himself to have apprehended but—” no, we will not finish the quotation; let the readers of “In Memoriam” finish it for themselves, and see how, after all, the poet, if he would reach perfection, must be found by Him who found St. Paul of old.  In the meantime, as a true poet must necessarily be in advance of his age, Mr. Tennyson’s earlier poems, rather than these latter ones, coincide with the tastes and speculations of the young men of this day.  And in proportion, we believe, as they thoroughly appreciate the distinctive peculiarities of those poems, will they be able to follow the author of them on his upward path.

Some of our readers, we would fain hope, remember as an era in their lives the first day on which they read those earlier poems; how, fifteen years ago, Mariana in the Moated Grange, “The Dying Swan,” “The Lady of Shalott,” came to them as revelations.  They seemed to themselves to have found at last a poet who promised not only to combine the cunning melody of Moore, the rich fulness of Keats, and the simplicity of Wordsworth, but one who was introducing a method of observing nature different from that of all the three and yet succeeding in everything which they had attempted, often in vain.  Both Keats and Moore had an eye for the beauty which lay in trivial and daily objects.  But in both of them, there was a want of deep religious reverence, which kept Moore playing gracefully upon the surface of phenomena without ever daring to dive into their laws or inner meaning; and made poor Keats fancy that he was rather to render nature poetical by bespangling her with florid ornament, than simply to confess that she was already, by the grace of God, far beyond the need of his paint and gilding.  Even Wordsworth himself had not full faith in the great dicta which he laid down in his famous Introductory Essay.  Deep as was his conviction that nature bore upon her simplest forms the finger-mark of God, he did not always dare simply to describe her as she was, and leave her to reveal her own mystery.  We do not say this in depreciation of one who stands now far above human praise or blame.  The wonder is, not that Wordsworth rose no higher, but that, considering the level on which his taste was formed, he had power to rise to the height above his age which he did attain.  He did a mighty work.  He has left the marks of his teaching upon every poet who has written verses worth reading for the last twenty years.  The idea by which he conquered was, as Coleridge well sets forth, the very one which, in its practical results on his own poetry, procured him loud and deserved ridicule.  This, which will be the root idea of the whole poetry of this generation, was the dignity of nature in all her manifestations, and not merely in those which may happen to suit the fastidiousness or Manichæism of any particular age.  He may have been at times fanatical on his idea, and have misused it, till it became self-contradictory, because he could not see the correlative truths which should have limited it.  But it is by fanatics, by men of one great thought, that great works are done; and it is good for the time that a man arose in it of fearless honesty enough to write Peter Bell and the Idiot Boy, to shake all the old methods of nature-painting to their roots, and set every man seriously to ask himself what he meant, or whether he meant anything real, reverent, or honest, when he talked about “poetic diction,” or “the beauties of nature.”  And after all, like all fanatics, Wordsworth was better than his own creed.  As Coleridge thoroughly shows in the second volume of the “Biographia Literaria,” and as may be seen nowhere more strikingly than in his grand posthumous work, his noblest poems and noblest stanzas are those in which his true poetic genius, unconsciously to himself, sets at naught his own pseudo-naturalist dogmas.

Now Mr. Tennyson, while fully adopting Wordsworth’s principle from the very first, seemed by instinctive taste to have escaped the snares which had proved too subtle both for Keats and Wordsworth.  Doubtless there are slight niaiseries, after the manner of both those poets, in the first editions of his earlier poems.  He seems, like most other great artists, to have first tried imitations of various styles which already existed, before he learnt the art of incorporating them into his own, and learning from all his predecessors, without losing his own individual peculiarities.  But there are descriptive passages in them also which neither Keats nor Wordsworth could have written, combining the honest sensuous observation which is common to them both, with a self-restrained simplicity which Keats did not live long enough to attain, and a stately and accurate melody, an earnest songfulness (to coin a word) which Wordsworth seldom attained, and from his inaccurate and uncertain ear, still seldomer preserved without the occurrence of a jar or a rattle, a false quantity, a false rapture, or a bathos.  And above all, or rather beneath all—for we suspect that this has been throughout the very secret of Mr. Tennyson’s power—there was a hush and a reverent awe, a sense of the mystery, the infinitude, the awfulness, as well as of the mere beauty of wayside things, which invested these poems as wholes with a peculiar richness, depth, and majesty of tone, beside which both Keats’s and Wordsworth’s methods of handling pastoral subjects looked like the colouring of Julio Romano or Watteau by the side of Correggio or Titian.

This deep simple faith in the divineness of Nature as she appears, which, in our eyes, is Mr. Tennyson’s differentia, is really the natural accompaniment of a quality at first sight its very opposite, and for which he is often blamed by a prosaic world; namely, his subjective and transcendental mysticism.  It is the mystic, after all, who will describe Nature most simply, because he sees most in her; because he is most ready to believe that she will reveal to others the same message which she has revealed to him.  Men like Behmen, Novalis, and Fourier, who can soar into the inner cloud-world of man’s spirit, even though they lose their way there, dazzled by excess of wonder—men who, like Wordsworth, can give utterance to such subtle anthropologic wisdom as the “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality,” will for that very reason most humbly and patiently “consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.”  And even so it is just because Mr. Tennyson is, far more than Wordsworth, mystical, and what an ignorant and money-getting generation, idolatrous of mere sensuous activity, calls “dreamy,” that he has become the greatest naturalistic poet which England has seen for several centuries.  The same faculty which enabled him to draw such subtle subjective pictures of womanhood as Adeline, Isabel, and Eleanor, enabled him to see, and therefore simply to describe, in one of the most distinctive and successful of his earlier poems, how

The creeping mosses and clambering weeds,And the willow branches hoar and dank,And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,And the silvery marish flowers that throngThe desolate creeks and pools among,Were flooded over with eddying song.

No doubt there are in the earlier poems exceptions to this style—attempts to adorn nature, and dazzle with a barbaric splendour akin to that of Keats—as, for instance, in the “Recollections of the Arabian Nights.”  But how cold and gaudy, in spite of individual beauties, is that poem by the side of either of the Marianas, and especially of the one in which the scenery is drawn, simply and faithfully, from those counties which the world considers the quintessence of the prosaic—the English fens.

Upon the middle of the nightWaking she heard the night-fowl crow;The cock sang out an hour ere light:From the dark fen the oxen’s lowCame to her: without hope of change,In sleep she seemed to walk forlorn,Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed mornAbout the lonely moated grange.* * * * *About a stone-cast from the wallA sluice with blackened waters slept,And o’er it many, round and small,The cluster’d marish-mosses crept.Hard by a poplar shook alway,All silver-green with gnarled bark,For leagues no other tree did markThe level waste, the rounding gray,

Throughout all these exquisite lines occurs but one instance of what the vulgar call “poetic diction.”  All is simple description, in short and Saxon words, and yet who can deny the effect to be perfect—superior to any similar passage in Wordsworth?  And why?  Because the passage quoted, and indeed the whole poem, is perfect in what artists call tone—tone in the metre and in the sound of the words, as well as in the images and the feelings expressed.  The weariness, the dreariness, the dark mysterious waste, exist alike within and without, in the slow monotonous pace of the metre and the words, as well as in the boundless fen, and the heart of her who, “without hope of change, in sleep did seem to walk forlorn.”

The same faith in Nature, the same instinctive correctness in melody, springing from that correct insight into Nature, ran through the poems inspired by medieval legends.  The very spirit of the old ballad writers, with their combinations of mysticism and objectivity, their freedom from any self-conscious attempt at reflective epithets or figures, runs through them all.  We are never jarred in them, as we are in all the attempts at ballad-writing and ballad-restoring before Mr. Tennyson’s time, by discordant touches of the reflective in thought, the picturesque in Nature, or the theatric in action.  To illustrate our meaning, readers may remember the ballad of “Fair Emmeline,” in Bishop Percy’s “Reliques.”  The bishop confesses, if we mistake not, to have patched one end of the ballad.  He need not have informed us of that fact, while such lines as these following meet our eyes:

The Baron turned aside,And wiped away the rising tearsHe proudly strove to hide.

No old ballad writer would have used such a complicated concetto.  Another, and even a worse instance is to be found in the difference between the old and new versions of the grand ballad of “Glasgerion.”  In the original, we hear how the elfin harper could

Harp fish out of the water,And water out of a stone,And milk out of a maiden’s breastThat bairn had never none.

For which some benighted “restorer” substitutes—

Oh, there was magic in his touch,And sorcery in his string!

No doubt there was.  But while the new poetaster informs you of the abstract notion, the ancient poet gives you the concrete fact; as Mr. Tennyson has done with wonderful art in his exquisite “St. Agnes,” where the saint’s subjective mysticism appears only as embodied in objective pictures:

Break up the heavens, oh Lord! and farThrough all yon starlight keenDraw me, thy bride, a glittering star,In raiment white and clean.

Sir Walter Scott’s ballads fail just on the same point.  Even Campbell cannot avoid an occasional false note of sentiment.  In Mr. Tennyson alone, as we think, the spirit of the Middle Age is perfectly reflected; its delight, not in the “sublime and picturesque,” but in the green leaves and spring flowers for their own sake—the spirit of Chaucer and of the “Robin Hood Garland”—the naturalism which revels as much in the hedgerow and garden as in Alps, and cataracts, and Italian skies, and the other strong stimulants to the faculty of admiration which the palled taste of an unhealthy age, from Keats and Byron down to Browning, has rushed abroad to seek.  It is enough for Mr. Tennyson’s truly English spirit to see how

On either side the river lieLong fields of barley and of rye,That clothe the wold and meet the sky;And through the field the road runs byTo many-tower’d Camelot.

Or how

In the stormy east wind straining,The pale yellow woods were waning,The broad stream in his banks complaining,Heavily the low sky rainingOver tower’d Camelot.

Give him but such scenery as that which he can see in every parish in England, and he will find it a fit scene for an ideal myth, subtler than a casuist’s questionings, deep as the deepest heart of woman.

But in this earlier volume the poet has not yet arrived at the art of combining his new speculations on man with his new mode of viewing Nature.  His objective pieces are too exclusively objective, his subjective too exclusively subjective; and where he deals with natural imagery in these latter, he is too apt, as in “Eleanore,” to fall back upon the old and received method of poetic diction, though he never indulges in a commonplace or a stock epithet.  But in the interval between 1830 and 1842 the needful interfusion of the two elements has taken place.  And in “Locksley Hall” and the “‘Two Voices” we find the new doubts and questions of the time embodied naturally and organically, in his own method of simple natural expression.  For instance, from the Search for Truth in the “Two Voices”—