Part 1 (2/2)

It is not easy to judge whether =Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)= will ever cease to retain the very wide hold upon the public which was his for at least thirty years prior to his death, and which is his to-day. The poems of Tennyson might be read by succeeding generations of Englishmen if only for their exquisite purity of style. Music he has also in abundance. In ”Harold,” ”Queen Mary,” and his other plays there is no great gift of characterisation, and these a.s.suredly will go the way of Southey's more ambitious poems. But in ”Maud” Tennyson caught the social aspiration of his time with singular insight. The world, he pleaded--and England in particular--was given over to money-getting. The capitalist was more tyrannical than the old, expiring slave-owner. Even peace was a mere word. There was a worse tyranny than that which left men for dead on the battle-field. There was the tyranny which ground them to dust for a bare pittance in mill and factory. Tennyson never wrote with greater force or with more perfect dramatic and lyric art, and his poem is as striking and effective to-day as at the time of its publication in 1855.

Lord Tennyson--for the Poet Laureate accepted a peerage in 1890--won the hearts of a wider audience by ”In Memoriam,” and of a still larger one by ”The Idylls of the King.” ”In Memoriam,” a lengthy elegy on his college friend, Arthur Hallam, touched the great religious public of England. The poem reflected a certain transcendentalism of view which was fast becoming fas.h.i.+onable.

”There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds”

was, in fact, more and more the prevailing tone among all phases of Protestantism where a few years earlier the exact opposite had been insisted upon.

One of the most agreeable pictures which our literary period affords is offered by the friends.h.i.+p between Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. The two men were not seldom compared; each had his partisans, and each his enthusiastic disciples. Neither from a social nor from a literary point of view would they seem to have had much in common. Browning was a regular diner-out, he appeared systematically at every picture-gallery, and at every public entertainment, and in all these things he was keenly interested: he loved society. Lord Tennyson, on the other hand, lived a retired life in one or other of his country houses. He was morbidly sensitive to the attentions of the crowd, and amusing stories are told of his desire to avoid the ”vulgar” gaze. Considered as literary men, the contrast between these poets was greater. Tennyson's language was dainty, simple, full of grace; his characters monotonous, lacking in vigour. Browning wrote with rugged force, and sometimes with an obscurity which left the reader bewildered. But his gift of characterisation was superb, and his men and women for individuality are comparable only to those of Shakspere. The hearts of all of us go out to Tennyson when we think of the music of his verses, of his gifts of natural description, his fine and captivating imagination; but our hearts and our intellects go out to Browning, as to one who has enshrined our best thoughts, who has touched all our deepest emotions.

It is true that half of Browning's sixteen volumes are flatly incomprehensible to the majority of us; but the other half are equal in bulk to the whole of Lord Tennyson's writings, and quite free from any suspicion of obscurity. The ”Ring and the Book” is not obscure. It is an exciting story, dramatically told. So also are the poems called ”Men and Women,” and the ”Dramatic Idyls.” ”Luria,” ”In a Balcony,” ”A Blot in the 'Scutcheon,” are as readable as railway novels. And yet Browning had, and has, none of the popularity of Tennyson. The one writer sold by thousands, and his financial reward was probably unprecedented in poetry; the other had but a small audience, an audience which never approached to one-third of his rival's. Notwithstanding all this, it is pleasing to note that the two poets loyally esteemed one another, as the dedication of some of their books conspicuously proves.

To write thus early of =Robert Browning (1812-1889)= is to antic.i.p.ate in the literary record. ”Pauline,” the poet's first poem, was published, it is true, in 1833; and that and successive poems were accepted by good critics as the work of a true poet. Nevertheless, Browning had to fight his way as no poet of equal merit has ever had to do, and it was very late indeed in the Victorian epoch that he became more than the poet of a limited circle. One there was, certainly, who appreciated his work from the first with no common fervour, for the world has long been familiar with the statement that a reference by Elizabeth Barrett in ”Lady Geraldine's Courts.h.i.+p” first brought the two poets together in 1845--

”From Browning some 'Pomegranate'

Which, if cut deep down the middle, Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, Of a veined humanity.”

They were married a year later. As exemplifying the condescension of their earlier contemporaries it is interesting to note Wordsworth's observation on the event--and Wordsworth had no humour--”So, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett have gone off together! Well, I hope they may understand each other--n.o.body else could!” Lord Granville, who was staying in Florence when a son was born to the poets there in 1849, was still more amusing although equally uncritical. ”Now there are not two incomprehensibles but three incomprehensibles,” he said.

It cannot be charged against =Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)= that she was in the least incomprehensible. Her ”Cry of the Children,”

”Cowper's Grave,” and ”Aurora Leigh,” have the note of extreme simplicity. Nor is obscurity a characteristic of ”Sonnets from the Portuguese,” which were not translations, but so named to disguise a wife's devotion to her husband. ”Aurora Leigh” she styled a ”novel in verse,” and it was in fact a very readable romance, marked by that zest for social reform which characterised the period.[4] ”The most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered,” she wrote of it.

After the marriage the pair lived princ.i.p.ally at Florence. In their Florentine home--Casa Guidi--”Aurora Leigh,” and ”Casa Guidi Windows”

were written, and here Mrs Browning died in June 1861. One may still see the house upon which the Florentine munic.i.p.ality has inscribed a tablet in grat.i.tude for the ”golden ring” of poetry with which the enthusiastic woman poet had attempted to unite England and Italy.

Another great Florentine by adoption, =Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)=, came to live near the Brownings. His rugged nature must have been not a little soothed by the gentle little woman with ”a soul of fire enclosed in a sh.e.l.l of pearl.” Landor was educated at Rugby, at Ashbourne, and at Trinity College, Oxford. From Rugby he was removed to avoid expulsion, and at Oxford he was rusticated. All this was the outcome of an excitable temperament, which led in later life to domestic complications, and to exile from his family in Florence. It found no reflection in his many beautiful works. As a poet, however, Landor holds no considerable rank, although here placed among them. ”Gebir” was published in 1798 and ”Count Julian” in 1812. Both these lengthy poems have received the rapturous praise of authoritative critics, De Quincey even declaring that Count Julian was a creation worthy to rank beside the Prometheus of aeschylus and Milton's Satan. Southey insisted indeed that Landor had written verses ”of which he would rather have been the author than of any produced in our time.” But Landor's poems, although obtainable in his collected works, and published in selections, command no audience to-day. With his prose the case is otherwise. There is little in the six volumes of ”Imaginary Conversations,” or in the two volumes of ”Longer Prose Works,” that does not merit attention alike for style and matter. ”Give me,” he says in one of his prefaces, ”ten accomplished men for readers and I am content.” Landor has all accomplished men for readers now. And all are at one with the critic who said that, ”excepting Shakspere, no other writer has furnished us with so many delicate aphorisms of human nature.” Mr Swinburne's expression of veneration is well known.

”I came as one whose thoughts half linger, Half run before; The youngest to the oldest singer That England bore.

I found him whom I shall not find Till all grief end; In holiest age our mightiest mind, Father and friend.”

The connecting link between Landor and his young admirer is sufficiently apparent. In genuine accomplishment, the imaginative literature of our era has produced no one comparable to Landor, save only =Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837- )=. Mr Swinburne has written well in several languages other than his own. In his own he has written tragedies of wider purpose than those of Tennyson, of equal insight with those of Browning. He has written n.o.ble sonnets, lyrics of exquisite melody, and one poem, ”Ave atque Vale,” which takes rank among the imperishable elegies of our literature. He has abundant spontaneity and a marvellous gift of rhythm. Added to all this, he is a critic of almost unequalled learning and distinction. He was the first to give adequate recognition to the poetic genius of Matthew Arnold and Emily Bronte. He knows Elizabethan literature with remarkable thoroughness, and he knows the literature of many ages and many lands better than most of the professors. His appreciation of Charles Lamb endears him to English readers, and his eulogies of Victor Hugo command the respect of Frenchmen. A great poet and a great prose writer, Mr Swinburne is perhaps the most distinguished literary figure of our day. Only when in the distant years his country has lost him, will a great folly be generally recognised. Why, it will be asked, did we not spontaneously call for him--arch democrat and arch rebel though he may have been--as the only possible successor to Lord Tennyson as Poet Laureate?

It has been said that Mr Swinburne was the first to recognise the great poetical gifts of =Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)=. Writing in the Fortnightly Review in 1867,[5] he remarked that the fame of Mr Matthew Arnold had for some years been almost exclusively the fame of a prose writer. ”Those students,” he continued, ”could hardly find hearing, who with all esteem and enjoyment of his essays ... retained the opinion that, if justly judged, he must be judged by his verse and not by his prose.” The view that Arnold excelled as a prose writer continued to hold sway for many years after Mr Swinburne wrote, and it was current up to the date of Arnold's death. ”Literature and Dogma” and ”G.o.d and the Bible,” the former of which first appeared in 1873, excited an extraordinary amount of attention, and helped largely to modify the religious beliefs of many men and women now rapidly approaching middle age. The son of a famous clergyman, Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby, Matthew Arnold was a product of that Broad Church movement which Dr Arnold had helped largely to inspire. A fellow-pupil of Dr Stanley, Dean of Westminster, Arnold went further than the Dean in his opposition to supernaturalism in religion, though he stopped short of the fiery antagonism which another eminent Anglican churchman, Bishop Colenso, displayed towards the miraculous stories of the Old Testament. But far more than Stanley or Colenso did he influence the Protestant Christianity of his day. This, however, scarcely enters into the discussion of Matthew Arnold the poet. More akin to that side of Arnold's life is his literary criticism. For many years he held in this field a well nigh undisputed throne. For a time he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. But his influence came mainly through a volume called ”Essays in Criticism” (1865), of which it is not too much to say that the paper ent.i.tled ”The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” gave a new impulse to all students of books. Here and elsewhere Arnold emphasised the opinion that not only a fine artistic instinct but a vast amount of knowledge, admitting of comparisons, is necessary as the equipment of a critic. Criticism he defined as ”a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.” Matthew Arnold had other claims as a prose writer. His appeal for the study of Celtic literature initiated and encouraged a revival of learning in Wales and in Ireland; and his books and essays on Education--for his main income for many years was derived from his salary as an Inspector of Schools--did much to further the cause which his brother-in-law, Mr W. E. Forster, began with the great Education Act of 1870.

But it is as a poet, as Mr Swinburne foretold, that Matthew Arnold lives in literature. It is strange to some of us to note how largely the bulk of his prose work has dropped out of the memory of the younger generation. The diligent collector possesses some forty-five volumes of Mr Arnold's writings; but although there has been a cheap reprint of many of these, it is only by his collected poems that he is widely known to-day. Mr Swinburne, in the essay to which I have referred, tells of the joy with which, as a schoolboy, he came upon a copy of ”Empedocles on Etna.” He must then have been about fifteen years of age, as ”Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems by A” was published in 1852. It contained ”Tristram and Iseult,” ”Stanzas in Memory of the Author of 'Obermann,'” and many now accepted favourites. ”The Strayed Reveller” by ”A” was a still earlier volume of anonymous verse (1849); and, in 1853, ”Poems” by Matthew Arnold made the poet known by name to a small circle.

A substantial recognition as a poet did not however fall to Matthew Arnold while he lived. His career is, indeed, a striking example of the fact that our views of contemporary literature require to be revised every decade. Ten years ago everyone was discussing Matthew Arnold's views concerning Isaiah and St Paul, and the Nonconformists, whom he chaffed good-humouredly, have reconstructed many of their beliefs through a study of his works. People were excited by his views on education and by his views on literature, but not by his poetry. To-day his poetry is all of him that remains, and its charm is likely to soothe the more strenuous minds among us for at least another generation, and perhaps for all time.

In ”Thyrsis,” a striking elegy on =Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861)=, Arnold struck a note which has only Milton's ”Lycidas” and Sh.e.l.ley's ”Adonais” to call forth comparisons. Clough was not a Keats, but he was a more considerable personage than Milton's friend, and indeed he has been persistently underrated by many men of letters. Not indeed by all.

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

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