No More Learning

They were the common topics of his
romantic predecessors, nature, English pastorals, ballad themes,
medieval romance, classical legend, love and death. But Tennyson
was burdened with no message, no new interpretation of nature
or the peasant, no fresh insight into the significance of things
medieval or things Hellenic. Each and all were subjects that
quickened his poetic imagination, and his concern was to attain
to the perfect rendering in melody and picturesque suggestion
of the mood which each begat in his brooding temperament.
Much has been said of Tennyson's relation to Keats and
Wordsworth ; but a closer tie unites him to Coleridge, the poet.
Like Coleridge, Tennyson is a poet not so much of passion and
passionate thinking as of moods-moods subtle and luxurious and
sombre, moods in which it is not always easy to discern the
line that separates waking from dreaming.
And, like Coleridge, Tennyson, from the outset, was a metrist,
bold in experiment and felicitous in achievement. Almost every
poem in these volumes was a distinct, conscious experiment in the
metrical expression of a single, definite mood. There were some
failures, not from inadequate control of the poet's medium of
verse (as Coleridge was inclined to think) but because, as
Christopher North pointed out, Tennyson occasionally mistook
for a poetic mood what was merely a fleeting fancy and recorded
it in lines that were, at times, even silly. Of the poems which
survived the purgation to which Tennyson subjected his work,
some are less happy than others, again not because the poet has
failed to make the verse the echo of the mood, but because the
mood itself was not one that was altogether congenial to his
mind. In lighter and simpler strains, Tennyson is never quite
spontaneous. But, when the mood was one of the poet's very
soul, luxurious or sombre or a complex blend of both, the metrical
expression was, from the first, a triumphant success. Claribel,
Mariana, 'A spirit haunts the year's last hours,' Recollections of
the Arabian Nights, The Dying Swan, The Lady of Shalott, the
blank verse of Enone, A Dream of Fair Women, The Palace of
Art, The Vision of Sin, The Lotos Eaters—all reveal (think what
one may of the philosophy of some or of the faults of phrase and
figure which marred the first transcripts) a poet with a command
of new and surprising and delightful metrical effects as unmis-
takably as did the early poems of Milton, the masterpieces of
>


## p. 27 (#43) ##############################################

11] Changes in Tennyson's Poems
27
Coleridge, Shelley's songs or Swinburne's Poems and Ballads.
The true character of the English verse foot which the romantic
poets had rediscovered without all of them quite knowing what
they had done, the possibilities of what Saintsbury calls 'substi-
tution,' the fact that, in verse whose indicator is a recurring stress,
the foot may be iambic, trochaic, spondaic or monosyllabic without
altering the time-lengths of the rhythmical interval, Tennyson
understood perfectly and he experimented on it with a conscious
and felicitous art, combining with this subtle management of
the foot a careful attention to the musical value of vowel
and consonant combinations in which his precursors are Gray and
Pope and Milton. And, for Tennyson, the guiding principle in
every experiment, from Claribel to The Vision of Sin, is the
dramatic appropriateness of verse to mood.
Many of the poems, as has been said, underwent drastic
revision ; but this revision seldom affected the metre, though the
concluding stanza of The Lotos Eaters is a striking exception.
It was the phrasing and imagery, the richly decorative and
picturesque diction, that was revised before the eyes of the reader
with wonderful results. The motive which dictated this labour
was the same as that which controlled the varied cadences of the
poet's verse, the desire to secure the full and exact expression
for the single mood which dominates the poem throughout. For
each of Tennyson's shorter poems, at any rate-hence, perhaps,
his preference of the idyll to the epic—is the expression of a
single mood of feeling. It is seldom that one of his songs or odes
or idylls carries the imagination of the reader from one mood of
feeling to another, as does an ode by Keats or Wordsworth,
while the stream of impassioned thought flows through the mind.
In his longer poems, In Memoriam and Idylls of the King, as
will be seen later, the plan of construction finally adopted is a
concession to this quality of the poet's genius. A brooding
imagination, a fine ear and a vivid and curious eye, the eye of
an artist who, also, was something of a naturalist-these are the
distinctive qualities of Tennyson's poetic temperament.
He
divined, as Keats had before him (but Keats's eye was not, to
a like extent, the dominant factor in his sensibility), that a picture
presented with extraordinary precision of detail may, if every
detail be relevant, contribute potently to the communication of
a mood of feeling-the whole secret of pre-Raphaelitism. But
he was also aware that mere description is no business of the
poet who describes only to communicate feeling. Accordingly,
>


## p. 28 (#44) ##############################################

28
[CH.
The Tennysons
i
1
1
1
1
1
the alterations which Tennyson introduced into his work, in so
far as they were not dictated by the ear, by the desire to secure
a purer more flute-like melody of vowel and consonant, had one of
two purposes in view, either to present a picture with greater
clearness of arrangement and vividness or wealth of detail, or, even
more often, to diminish merely descriptive effects, to substitute one
or two significant, suggestive details for a fully drawn picture, in
every way to intensify the emotional, dramatic effect as by passing
the stanza once more through the dyeing vat of the poet's own
passionate mood. Of passages in which the first aim predominates,
a classical example is the opening landscape in Enone, but a
shorter may be cited from The Palace of Art :
One seemed a foreground black with stones and slags,
Below sunsmitten icy spires
Rose striped with long white cloud the scornful crags
Deeptrenched with thunderfires,
compared with
And one a foreground black with stones and slags,
Beyond, a line of heights, and higher
All barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags,
And highest, snow and fire.
Of the other process, the subtle heightening of the emotional
thrill, examples will be found in all the poems mentioned; but two
short passages may be cited by way of illustration :
No time hath she to sport and play,
A charmed web she weaves alway,
A curse is on her if she stay
Her weaving either night or day,
To look down to Camelot,
compared with
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot,
or,
She moved her lips, she prayed alone,
She praying disarrayed and warm
From slumber, deep her wavy form
In the darklustrous mirror shone.
“Madonna,” in a low, clear tone
Said Mariana, night and morn,
Low she mourned, “I am all alone,
Love-forgotten, and love-forlorn,"
compared with
Complaining, 'Mother, give me grace
To help me of my weary load. '
And on the liquid mirror glow'd
The clear perfection of her face.
.
1
1
i
6
!


## p. 29 (#45) ##############################################

11]
His Style and Topics
29
6
• Is this the form,' she made her moan,
'That won his praises night and morn? '
And 'Ah,' she said, 'but I wake alone,
I sleep forgotten, I wake forlorn. '
The heightened glow of the picture in the lines italicised is not
more striking than the dramatic significance of 'Is this the form,'
etc. But, perhaps, the supreme examples of the poet's power to
enrich his verses by passing them once again through the mood in
which the whole poem was conceived are the closing stanzas of
The Lady of Shalott and of The Lotos Eaters.
The outcome of the severe course of training to which Tenuyson
submitted his art-a process that never quite came to an end, for
later poems were, also, carefully revised after publication—was a
style, the ground and texture of which is a pure, idiomatic English,
mannered as, in a different way, the style of Milton is mannered,
decorative as, in a different way, the style of Milton is decorative',
and a verse of wonderful variety, a felicitous adaptability to the
mood of the poem, and a curiously elaborated melody of vowel
and consonant. With the exception of Gray-for Pope's 'correct-
ness' is not entirely a poetical excellence-English poetry had
produced nothing since Milton that is so obviously the result of a
strenuous and unwearied pursuit of perfection of form.
Tennyson's range of topics is, also, fully represented in the
1842 volumes-studies of mood and character ranging from the
first slight sketches of Adelines and Marianas to the complexities
of Simeon Stylites, St Agnes and Sir Galahad, and the nobility of
Ulysses ; studies of English rural life like Dora, among the least
successful of Tennyson's poems, not because (as a critic has com-
plained) they have too much of Wordsworth’s ‘silly sooth,' but
because they lack the intense conviction which keeps Wordsworth
from ever being 'silly,' though he may at times be absurd, and
exalts his 'sooth' into imaginative truth; medieval studies in
which was now included Morte d'Arthur, starting point of the
later Idylls of the King; classical legend represented by the
early Enone recast and Ulysses, for Tithonus though written was
not yet published; and, lastly, poems in which Tennyson touches
on the mysteries of life and death and immortality, themes round
1 The ground-work of Milton's style is English Latinised in syntax, idiom and
vocabulary. Of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, a contemporary critic says: 'In the
history of the English language these poems will occupy a remarkable place as
examples of vigorous, unaffected, and almost unmixed Saxon written at a time in
which all the ordinary walks of literature are becoming rapidly vulgarised with bastard
Latinity,' The Edinburgh Review, 1859. Dyboski's Tennyson's Sprache und Stil
collects Tennyson's usages and throws an instructive light on his mannerisms.
6
6
>


## p. 30 (#46) ##############################################

30
[CH.
The Tennysons
which his brooding imagination was to circle all his life with a
sincerer passionate and pathetic interest than he felt for any
other
subject that engaged his art-seeking, finding, but never long sure
that he really had found, like some lone, ghostly sea-bird wheeling
round the luring, dazzling, baffling beams of a lighthouse on some
stormy headland. For all his questing, Tennyson was never to get
much further than the vague hope of the closing section of The
Vision of Sin :
At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, “Is there any hope ? '
To which an answer peal'd from that high land,
But in a tongue no man could understand;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.
The sombre note of the scene and the song which precede this
close was to be heard more than once again in the verse of the
poet who had already written The Two Voices and was yet to
write Vastness. Of political pieces, the volumes included the
very characteristic poems 'You ask me, why,' 'Love thou thy land,'
*Of old sat Freedom' and the very popular, if now somewhat faded,
trochaics of Locksley Hall.
These latter poems, and such additions to his earlier work as
Morte d'Arthur, Ulysses and Love and Duty, were proof that
not only had Tennyson completely mastered his decorative, musical
style but that his poetry had gained in thought, in dramatic insight,
in depth and poignancy of feeling ; and the question for a lover
of Tennyson's poetry in 1842 must have been, was this advance to
be continuous, such an increasing dramatic understanding of the
passionate heart of man as carried Shakespeare from A Mid-
summer Night's Dream to Macbeth and Othello, with all the change
in style and verse which that process brought with it, or such an
absorption in a great theme, the burden of a message, as produced
La Divina Commedia or Paradise Lost. For there were dangers
besetting Tennyson's laborious cultivation of a new and rich
poetic diction, dangers which betrayed themselves very evidently
in the first considerable poem that followed the 1842 volumes,
the longest poem Tennyson had yet attempted, and the first in
which he set himself conscientiously in the mood in which he
had conceived The Palace of Art) to give to his poetry a didactic
intention. The Princess, first published in 1847 but revised and
re-revised in 1851 and 1853, if it exhibits all the characteristic
excellences of Tennyson's style, his mellifluous blank verse and


## p. 31 (#47) ##############################################

11]
The Princess
31
6
polished, jewelled phrasing, reveals with equal clearness its limita-
tions and faults. The blend of humour and sentiment and serious
purpose is not altogether a success—Alfred, whatever he may
think,' said FitzGerald, 'cannot trifle. His smile is rather a
grim one'—and of dramatic interest there is the merest suggestion
in the grandiloquent princess, the silly prince and their slightly
outlined companions. Moreover, the style, with all its beauties,
reveals, as some of the later Idylls of the King were to do, the
radical want of simplicity, which is not really disguised by the
purity, of Tennyson's style, a tendency to conceit and decoration
which seeks to make poetry of a plain statement by periphrasis
and irrelevant, even if beautiful, figure. Gladstone admired the
skill with which Tennyson could make poetical the description of
a game-pie :
Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay
Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks
Imbedded and injellied,
and describe mathematics as
The hard-grain'd Muses of the cube and square.
The Princess abounds in refinements of this kind, as when the
prince
sat down and wrote,
In such a hand as when a field of corn
Bows all its ears before the roaring East,
or the remark that Cyril's wilder frolics are not the surest index
to his character is thus adorned :
He has a solid base of temperament:
But as the waterlily starts and slides
Upon the level in little puffs of wind,
Tho' anchor'd to the bottom, such is he.
Even when the poem rises to a higher level of seriousness in
the closing sections, the style is still elaborated and brocaded out
of all proportion to the theme. Yet of such art the final per-
fection is found in an appearance of simplicity, and that, too,
Tennyson achieved in the lyrics which were added to the third
edition—the subtle ‘silly sooth' of 'We fell out' and 'Sweet and
low,' the pealing music of 'The splendour falls,' the sophisticated,
coloured art of ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal,' and, lastly, the
melody, the vision and the passionate wail of Tears, idle tears'
the most moving and finely wrought lyric Tennyson ever wrote.
6


## p. 32 (#48) ##############################################

32
[CH.
The Tennysons
The quality which such art, with all its wonderful elaboration,
lacks is that last secret of a great style which Dante indicates
when he defines the dolce stil nuovo-for what is true of love
is true of any other adequate theme-
Ed io a lui : 'Io mi son un che, quando
Amor mi spira, noto, ed a quel modo
Che ditta dentro, vo significando l'
He had not yet written as when a great subject appears to take
the pen and write itself. But, in 1850, Tennyson seemed to
his readers to have found such an inspiring theme, when the poem
on which he had been at work ever since the death in 1833 of his
friend Arthur Henry Hallam was published under the simple title
In Memoriam, for the theme, death and immortality, was that
on which Tennyson ever felt most deeply, was most constantly
haunted and agitated by conflicting hopes and fears. In no
poems had he written with more evident sincerity, more directness,
a finer balance of thought and style, than in those poems which,
like Ulysses and The Vision of Sin, were precursors of this longer
poem on life and death and immortality, sorrow and sin and the
justification of God's ways to men.
In Memoriam is not altogether free from the faults of Tenny-
sonian diction, phrasing such as 'eaves of weary eyes' or
And where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God,
but, with few exceptions, the style is pure, direct and masculine,
and to this not only the theme but the verse contributed, a verse
which Ben Jonson and lord Herbert of Cherbury had used before
him, but which Tennyson made his own by the new weight and
melody which he gave to it. In Tennyson's hands, the verse
acquired something of the weight and something of the fittingness
for a long meditative poem of the terza rima as used by Dante,
the same perfection of internal movement combined with the
same invitation to continue, an eddying yet forward movement?
The construction of the poem in separate sections, some of
which are linked together in groups by continuity of theme, was
that which gave freest scope to Tennyson's genius, allowing him to
make of each section the expression of a single, intense mood.
But the claim for In Memoriam, that it is not merely a collection
of poems of varying degrees of beauty but a great poem, rests on
6
1 Purgatorio, xxiv, 52–4.
? See Saintsbury, History of English Prosody, vol. 11, p. 205, and, on the terza rima,
as used by Dante and by English poets, ibid. pp. 361–5.
9


## p. 33 (#49) ##############################################

II]
In Memoriam
33
а
the degree of success with which Tennyson has woven these
together into a poem portraying the progress of the human spirit
from sorrow to joy, not by the loss of love or the mere dulling of
grief, but by the merging of the passion for the individual friend,
removed but still living, into the larger love of God and of his
fellow-men! If the present generation does not estimate In
Memoriam quite so highly as its first readers, it is because time,
which has a way of making clear the interval between a poet's
intention and his achievement, the expressed purpose of a Paradise
Lost and its final effect, has shown that Tennyson failed to make
this central experience, this great transition, imaginatively con-
vincing and impressive. It is not in the vague philosophy, with a
dash of semi-mystical experience, in which is veiled the simple
process by which the heart grows reconciled to loss and life renews
her spell, nor in the finished and illuminated style in which all
this is clothed—it is not here that the reader of today finds the
true Tennyson, the poet with his own unique and splendid gifts,
but in the sombre moods and the lovely landscapes of individual
sections. "Old Yew, which graspest at the stones,' 'Dark house, by
which once more I stand,' 'Calm is the morn without a sound,'
‘To-night the winds begin to rise,' 'With trembling fingers did we
weave'-sections such as these, or the passionate sequence begin-
ning ‘Oh yet we trust that somehow good,' and later, lovelier
flights as 'When on my bed the moonlight falls,' 'I cannot see the
features right,'Witch-elms that counterchange the floor,''By
night we linger'd on the lawn,' ‘Unwatch’d, the garden bough
shall sway,' 'Sad Hesper o'er the buried sun'—these are likely to
be dear to lovers of English poetry by their expression of
mood in picture and music, long after the philosophy of In
Memoriam has been forgotten. It is not the mystical experience
of the ninety-fifth section which haunts the memory, but the
beauty of the sun-rise that follows when
&
>
6
6
the doubtful dusk reveald
The knolls once more where, couch'd at ease,
The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field :
And suck'd from out the distant gloom
A breeze began to tremble oʻer
The large leaves of the sycamore,
And fluctuate all the still perfume,
2
See A. C. Bradley, A Commentary on Tennyson's 'In Memoriam,' in which
the development of this thought is traced.
E. L. XIII. CH. II.
3


## p. 34 (#50) ##############################################

34
[CH.
The Tennysons
And gathering freshlier overhead,
Rock'd the full foliaged elms, and swung
The heavy-folded rose, and flung
The lilies to and fro, and said
*The dawn, the dawn,' and died away;
And East and West, without a breath,
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,
To broaden into boundless day.
6
To the theme of the most agitated sections of the poem, those
whose theme is not the removal of the friend by death from the
sight and touch of those that loved him, but the more terrible
doubt as to a life after death, the poet was to recur again, to
fight more than one 'weird battle of the west,' before he faced the
final issue with courage and resignation and hope.
In the year of In Memoriam, Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth
in the post of poet laureate, and his first official poem was the fine
Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852), a bold metrical
experiment, the motif for which is given by the funeral march and
the pomp of the obsequies in St Paul's. In the dramatic use of
varying metres no poet was ever a more constant and generally
felicitous experimenter than Tennyson, and in his next considerable
poem Maud, issued in Maud, and Other Poems (1855), he employed
the device of sections, not, as in In Memoriam, of like metrical
structure, but varying in the boldest fashion from long six-foot to
short three-foot lines, to tell in monodrama a story of tragic
passion. The hero and narrator is dramatically conceived, and
Tennyson was very anxious not to be identified with the Hamlet
of his story. But the political opinions which he put into his
mouth were his own, in the main, and the morbid, hysterical tem-
perament was his own, too, dramatically intensified and elaborated.
The result was a poem which greatly disconcerted his admirers
-alike those who would have had him content to remain the
Theocritus of idylls like The Gardener's Daughter and The Brook
(which was published in the same volume as Maud), and those who
were calling on him for a great poem, and were prepared to acclaim
him-mainly on the strength of Locksley Hall—as the laureate of
an age of 'unexampled progress. ' The latter were profoundly
shocked at the poet's fierce exultation over war for a cause, his
clear perception of the seamy side of commercial prosperity and
his contempt for what he thought a mean conception of the
blessing of peace. A great poem Maud is not. The heroine is
too shadowy, the hero a Hamlet only in the hysterical instability
of his temperament, with none of Hamlet's range of thought, or


## p. 35 (#51) ##############################################

11]
Idylls of the King
35
that ultimate strength of soul which held madness and suicide at
arm's length; but ‘I have led her home,' 'Come into the garden,
Maud,' and 'O that 'twere possible' are among the most perfect of
Tennyson's dramatic love-lyrics.
The great poem, the magnum opus, to which Tennyson's critics
summoned him insistently and on which his mind dwelt with
almost too conscientious a desire to fulfil what was expected of
him, began to take shape finally, in the only form in which his
genius could work at ease (the concentration, in a poem of not too
great length, on a single mood of feeling), with the composition of
Idylls of the King. Malory's Morte d'Arthur had early arrested
his attention.
I could not read Palmerin of England nor Amadis, nor any other of
those Romances through. The Morte d'Arthur is much the best: there are
very fine things in it; but all strung together without Art.
So he told FitzGerald, and his first experiment in the retelling of
the old legends, Morte d'Arthur, had appeared in 1842 as a
fragment of Homeric epic. Nothing more was added till 1857,
when Enid and Nimuë was issued in an edition of some six
copies. This issue was followed, in 1859, by The True and the
False, Four Idylls of the King, containing Enid, Nimuë (Vivien),
Elaine and Guinevere. In the same year, the four idylls were
issued as Idylls of the King. In 1869 were added The Coming
of Arthur, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and Ettarre and The
Passing of Arthur. The Last Tournament (1871), Gareth and
Lynette (1872), Balin and Balan (1885) came later, and, in the
final arrangement, Geraint and Enid was divided into two
parts.
In the later poems, the epic, Homeric flavour of the first Morte
is abandoned for a more purely idyllic tone, a chiselled, polished,
jewelled exquisiteness of Alexandrian art.
Of blank verse,
Tennyson was an exacting critic and a master in a manner as
definitely his own as Thomson's, but with a greater claim to be
compared with the finest of English non-dramatic blank verse,
that is Milton's. And when the theme is reflective, oratorical or
dramatic—at least in monologue, Tennyson's blank verse is
melodious and sonorous, variously paused and felicitously drawn
out into effective paragraphs. A continuous study reveals a
greater monotony of effect than in Milton's ever varied harmonies,
1 'We once more call upon him to do the duty which England has long expected
of him, and to give us a great poem on a great subject,' The Edinburgh Review,
1855.
34-2


## p. 36 (#52) ##############################################

36
[ch.
The Tennysons
6
and there is never the grand undertone of passion, of the storm
that has raised the ground swell. It is in narrative that the faults
of Tennyson's blank verse become apparent-its too flagrant
artificiality. The pauses and cadences are too carefully chosen,
the diction too precious, the movement too mincing, the whole
'too picked, too spruce, too affected':
So coming to the fountain-side beheld
Balin and Balan sitting statuelike,
Brethren, to right and left the spring, that down,
From underneath a plume of lady-fern
Sang, and the sand danced at the bottom of it.
One could multiply such instances-taken quite at random-from
the Idylls, especially from the descriptions of tournament or
combat. In his parody of The Brook, Calverley has caught to
perfection the mincing gait and affected phrasing of this
Tennysonian fine-writing :
Thus on he prattled like a babbling brook,
Then I, “The sun hath slipt behind the hill,
And my Aunt Vivian dines at half-past six. ”
So in all love we parted; I to the Hall,
They to the village. It was noised next noon
That chickens had been miss'd at Syllabub Farm.
The over-exquisite elaboration of form is in keeping with
Tennyson's whole treatment of the old legends, rich in a colour
and atmosphere of their own. With the spirit of the Arthurian
stories, in which elements of a Celtic, primitive world are blended
in a complex, now hardly to be disentangled, fashion with medieval
chivalry and catholic, sacramental symbolism, the Victorian poet
was out of sympathy. Neither the aimless fighting in which they
abound, nor the cult of love as a passion so inspiring and ennobling
that it glorified even sin, nor the mystical adoration of the Host
and the ascetic quest of a spotless purity in the love and service
of God, appealed deeply to Tennyson, who wished to give to the
fighting a philanthropic purpose, to combine love with purity in
marriage and to find the mystic revelation of God in the world
in which we move and serve.
It is not easy to pour new wine into old bottles, to charge old
stories with a new spirit. If Milton's classical treatment of Biblical
themes is a wonderful tour de force—and it is not a complete
success—it is because the spirit of the poet and the poem is, after
all, rather Hebraic than Hellenic. There is as much of the Hebrew
prophets in his work as of the Greek poets. It is still harder to
give a new soul to old legends if one is not quite sure what that


## p. 37 (#53) ##############################################

11]
Idylls of the King
37
soul is to be. The allegory which was to connect the whole, 'the
conflict continually maintained between the spirit and the flesh,'
is, at once, too obvious and too vague, too vague as an interpre-
tation of the story as a whole, too obvious when it appears as an
occasional intrusion of a double meaning—in Gareth and Lynette
or The Holy Grail. It was, indeed, a misfortune that Tennyson
was determined to tie the tin kettle of a didactic intention to
the tail of all poems of this period. The general moral signi-
ficance of the old story was clear enough—do after the good
and leave the evil and it shall bring you to good fame and
renommee '—and needed no philosophic pointer.
-
The sole
justification for rehandling the legends was the possibility of
giving them a new and heightened poetic beauty and dramatic
significance.
In the latter, the poet has certainly not wholly failed, and it is
this dramatic significance, rather than the vague allegory, which
connects the stories and gives to the series a power over and above
the charm of the separate tales. As in In Memoriam, so in Idylls
of the King, the connecting link between the parts is a gradually
induced change of mood. Each Idyll has its dominant mood
reflected in the story, the characters and the scenery in which
these are set, from the bright youth and glad spring-tide of
Gareth and Lynette to the disillusionment and flying yellow
leaves of The Last Tournament, the mists and winter-cold of
the parting with Guinevere and that last, dim, weird battle of the
west. ' The dramatic background to this change of mood is the
story of Lancelot and Guinevere, and the final test of Tennyson's
success or failure in his most ambitious work is his handling of
this story; the most interesting group of characters are the four
that contemplate each other with mournful and troubled eyes
as in some novel of modern life, Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere
and Elaine. In part, Tennyson has succeeded, almost greatly ; in
part, he has inevitably failed. Elaine is perfect, a wonderful
humanising of the earlier, half mystical Lady of Shalott. Lancelot,
too, is surely a great study of the flower of knighthood caught in
the trammels of an overpowering, ruining passion, a modern
picture drawn on the lines of the old; and Guinevere, too,
slightly, yet distinctly, drawn
6
in her splendid beauty--wilful, impetuous, self-indulgent-yet full of courtesy
and grace and, when she pleases, of self-control also; not without a sense in
her of the greatness of the work which she is marring; not without a bitter
consciousness of her secret humiliation and the place she has lost; but yet


## p. 38 (#54) ##############################################

38
[ch.
The Tennysons
too proud, too passionate, too resolute to yield even to her own com-
punctions 1
The failure is Arthur, and it could hardly be otherwise. A
shadowy figure in the old legends, Tennyson has made him not
more but less real, a 'conception of man as he might be,' Gladstone
declared, and, in consequence, of man as he ought not to be in such
a dramatic setting. Like the Lady in Comus, Arthur has become
a symbol, not a human being. As the former, when she speaks,
is not a young English girl, but the personification of chastity, so
Arthur is, as in Spenser's poem, the embodiment of complete
virtue conceived in a Victorian fashion, with a little too much
in him of the endless clergyman,' which Tennyson said was the
Englishman's idea of God. And the last speech he delivers over
the fallen Guinevere is, in consequence, at once magnificent and
intolerable. The most popular of his works when they appeared,
Idylls of the King, is, today, probably the chief stumbling-block
to a young student of Tennyson. Its Parnassian beauties, its
vaguely religious and somewhat timid morality reflect too vividly
the spirit of their own day. Yet, even English poetry would need
to be richer than it is before we could afford to forget or ignore
such a wealth of splendid colour and music as these poems
present.
The same excess of sentiment, which, in a great poem, should
have given place to thought and passion, and the same over-
elaborate art, are apparent in the rustic idyll which gives its name
to the volume published in 1864, Enoch Arden, etc. , a tragedy of
village life founded on a story given to Tennyson by the sculptor
Woolner, recalling, in many of its details, Crabbe's The Parting
Hour. Fundamentally, there is more of Crabbe than of
Wordsworth in Tennyson's tales of English country-life, for,
though Tennyson is more sentimental than Crabbe and his treat-
ment far more decorative, he does not idealise in the mystical
manner of Wordsworth. But, in style and verse, there could not
well be a greater difference than that between the vivid pictures,
the tropical colouring, the sophisticate simplicity of Enoch Arden
and the limited, conventional phraseology, the monotonous verse
in which Crabbe tells his story with so much more of sheer
dramatic truth. But it was in the direction of sheer dramatic
truth, mastering and, to some extent, simplifying the style, that
Tennyson's genius was advancing most fruitfully, and the earnest
of this is two poems which accompany Enoch Arden, the dialect
1 From a review of Idylls of the King in The Edinburgh Review, April 1870.


## p. 39 (#55) ##############################################

11]
The Dramas and Later Poems
39
ballads in six-foot anapaests, The Grandmother and The Northern
Farmer-old Style, the first of which owes its poignancy to the
sorrow with which Tennyson gazed on his own first child born
dead, while the latter is the earliest altogether felicitous expression
of the vein of dramatic humour which ran through his naturally
sombre temperament. Tennyson could not trifle, but he had a
gift of caustic satire to which he might have given freer play with
advantage to his permanent, if not his immediate, popularity. The
two farmer poems and The Village Wife are worth several such
poems as Dora and Enoch Arden.
He bestowed infinite trouble on his dramas,' his son says,
and they bear every mark of a careful study of the sources, thought-
ful delineation of character, finished expression and versification.
What they want is dramatic life and force. The historical plays
are the product of his patriotism and his dislike of catholicism;
but the political interest is not, as in Shakespeare's plays, quickly
superseded by the dramatic. The characters do not become alive
and take the conduct of the play into their own hands, as Falstaff
and the humorous characters in Shakespeare's English plays tend
to do. In Queen Mary, no single character arrests and dominates
our interest, and the hero of Harold, as of many modern plays,
is of the Hamlet type of character, without quite being a Hamlet,
more interested in the conflict of his own impulses and inhibitions
than the driving force of a play full of action and incident.
The most single in interest and the most impressive is Becket.
Thoughtful and accomplished as they are, none of Tennyson's
dramas is the product of the imagination which begat the
greatest and most characteristic of his poems.
It is in the poems beginning with the above mentioned
dialect poems and continued in Lucretius (1868), The Revenge:
A Ballad of the Fleet (1878), the startling Ballads and Other
Poems of 1880 and the subsequent similar studies, published, some
of them, separately and then collected in the successive volumes
-Tiresias, and Other Poems (1885), Locksley Hall Sixty Years
After (1886), Demeter and Other Poems (1889), The Death of
Enone, Akbar's Dream, and Other Poems (1892)—that the later
Tennyson appears in poems revealing the same careful structure
and metrical cunning as the romantic studies that filled the
two volumes of 1842. But the romantic colour and magic are
gone; gone, too, is the suggestion of an optimistic philosophy which
has tempted some critics to apply the strange epithet complacent'
to the troubled, sensitive soul of Tennyson. What has taken the


## p. 40 (#56) ##############################################

40
[CH.
The Tennysons
6
place of these is a more poignant dramatic note, a more troubled
outlook upon life and the world around him, a severer but, in its
severity, a no less felicitous style, rarely a less dramatic adjustment
of rhythm to feeling.
Tennyson's sensitive imagination was ever responsive to the
moral atmosphere around him. It was the high seriousness of
Hallam and his Cambridge friends, their sympathy with moral
and political progress, which had encouraged him to endeavour,
even too strenuously, to charge his work with didactic intention,
which had made him strive, often against his deepest instincts and
prejudices, to sympathise with the claims of advancing democracy
and which had instilled into his mind the one article of his vague and
more emotional than dogmatic Christianity, the belief in the ‘far
future,' the ultimate triumph of love. And now it seemed as though
these high thoughts and hopes were illusions, and the morbid
vein in which he had already written The Two Voices becomes
dominant, strengthened by his consciousness of the times being
‘out of joint. ' Coleridgean Christianity had given place to modern
science and the religion of Lucretius. Romance was yielding
ground to a realism as sombre as Crabbe's, but more pathological
and irreverent. Democracy had not brought all the blessings
that were promised, and it seemed to Tennyson to be relaxing
the national spirit, the patriotism and heroism which had made
England great. The feelings with which all these changes affected
Tennyson are vividly reflected in all his later poems. The patriotic
poems breathe a more fervent, a fiercer patriotism. The Revenge,
The Defence of Lucknow, The Charge of the Heavy Brigade are
instinct with a patriotism which allows of scant sympathy with
Indian rebels, ‘Russian hordes,' or 'the Inquisition dogs and the
devildoms of Spain. The ballads of peasant humours, as The
Spinster's Sweet-Arts and The Village Wife; or, The Entail, and
of peasant sorrows and tragedies, like The Grandmother and
Rizpah are as realistic, sombre and humorous as some of the con-
temporary novels of country life-poems at the opposite pole
from The Gardener's Daughter and The Miller's Daughter. In
stories of modern life, as already in the earlier Aylmer's Field,
there is the note of hysterical feeling which betrays the jarring
of the poet's nerves as he contemplated certain aspects of modern
life in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, Despair, In the Chil-
drens' Hospital. In the meditative poems in blank verse, classical
idylls from Lucretius to Tiresias, idylls from history as Sir John
Oldcastle, Columbus, St Telemachus, or more lyrical meditations
6


## p. 41 (#57) ##############################################

II]
Experiments in Metre
41
like Vastness, his mind circles ever round one theme in various
aspects, the pathos of man's destiny wandering between faiths
which are rooted in fear and a widening knowledge that dispels
the superstitious fears but leaves him no hope, the tragic grandeur
of man's sensitive soul terribly environed, the cost and pain
with which he has struggled forwards to
The worship which is Love, (to) see no more
The Stone, the Wheel, the dimly-glimmering lawns
Of that Elysium, all the hateful fires
Of torment, and the shadowy warrior glide
Along the silent field of Asphodel,
and the haunting fear that, after all, the purer faith may be a
dream, melting in the cold light of physical science :
What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at
last,
Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the deeps of a meaningless
Past?
Tennyson was not able to expel, though he could subdue, the
ghosts which haunted him. He never thought his way through
any of the problems, political, moral or metaphysical, which the
age presented, and, to the reader of today, it is not the thought
of these poems which matters, but the reaction of this thought
on their dramatic and poetic quality, the piercing note which it
gave to poems that have lost the wonderful fragrance and colour
-the rich bouquet if one might change the figure—of the 1842
poems, but in whose autumnal tints and severer outlines there is
a charm more deeply felt than in the overwrought perfection, the
deliberate intention of the middle period poems.
In one respect, these poems show little, if any, abatement of
force, that is in the dramatic adjustment of metre to mood. The
blank verse of the later pieces is simpler and less mannered than
in Idylls of the King, while retaining the variety and dignity of
movement which Tennyson's blank verse always has when used
for meditative, and not narrative, poetry. Tithonus has all, and
more than all, the magic of the earlier Enone in the rendering of
a passionate mood in a setting of exquisite natural description,
and Lucretius all, and more than all, the dramatic and psycho-
logical subtlety and force of such an earlier study of mental
disturbance as St Simeon Stylites ; and, to the last, in Tiresias
and Demeter and St Telemachus, the stately movement, the vowelled
melody, hardly flags.


## p. 42 (#58) ##############################################

42
[CH.
The Tennysons
But the metre in which Tennyson experimented most re-
peatedly in the last poems is the anapaestic, generally in a six-foot
line. All the dialect pieces are in this metre and the verse is
admirably adapted to the drawling speech of the English rustic.
In The Revenge, where the anapaest interchanges freely with
shorter, more massive, rhythms, the poet has achieved one of
his masterpieces in dramatic, picturesque, glowing narrative,
the finest poem of English heroic patriotism since Drayton's
Agincourt, perhaps the greatest war-poem in the language; and,
metrically, The Charge of the Heavy Brigade is not less felicitous
though the story is not so romantic and picturesque. In The
Voyage of Maeldune, Tennyson opened at the end of his life
another storehouse of Celtic legend than the Arthurian, and the
metre, again, is perfectly adapted to the monotony of marvel and
magic which is the note of Irish story. It is, however, more
doubtful whether the six-foot anapaest was so well suited to the
tales of modern life, Despair, The Flight, The Wreck, etc.
, of
which Tennyson wrote, perhaps, more than enough in his last
years. Certainly, the blank verse poem The Sisters is a happier
effort. The ballad movement is not well adaptable to such themes,
and the verse, quite in keeping with the style of rustic narrative,
seems, by its monotony, to heighten the tone of hysterical
sensibility, the 'spasmodic' character, of these not very pleasing
poems.
Blank verse and anapaests by no means exhaust the metres of
these last volumes, though some of these are professedly experi-
ments. In The Daisy, published in the Maud volume, Tennyson
was justly proud of having caught ‘a far-off echo of the Horatian
Alcaic'; and his trochaics are not less felicitous than his anapaests.
The last volumes contain, as well as the second Locksley Hall,
the lovely echo of Catullus's lament,
Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row!
and the clangour of the great lines To Virgil,
Landscape-lover, lord of language,
the worthiest tribute which has been paid to the Roman poet since
Dante. To the last, Tennyson was capable of springing such
surprises on those who were babbling of his decadence; to the
last, he was able to delight by the musical and picturesque inter-
pretation of mood and dream. The author of Tears, idle tears
could write at the age of eighty :


## p. 43 (#59) ##############################################

11]
The Englishman in Tennyson
43
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
The very fullness of Tennyson's popularity, unlike anything
since Pope, provoked the inevitable reaction. To do justice to the
great body of varied and splendid poetry he lived to complete
without any such subsidence of original inspiration as is evident
in all the later work of Wordsworth, relieved though that is by fitful
recurrences of the old magic, time was needed, time which
separates unerringly the most accomplished writing and interest-
ing thought from poetry, the expression of an imaginative,
musical soul. It was on the thinker, the seer, that the greatest
admirers of the old poet, Frederick Myers and others, were
tempted to lay stress, the prophet of immortality in an age of
positivism. But Tennyson was no seer like Blake or Wordsworth,
no agile dialectician like Browning. He was a great sensitive soul,
full of British prejudices but also with a British conscience,
anxious to render a good account of the talent entrusted to him,
to make art the handmaid of duty and faith, but troubled by the
course of events and unable to find any solution save a faith in the
'far future,' in a process that runs through all things, the
one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
Since Shakespeare, there has been no poet so English in his
prejudices and in his love of the soil and scenery of England,
her peasants and her great sailors and soldiers. To speak of him
as a representative Victorian is a mistake if it suggests that there
was in him anything of Macaulay's complacent pride in the
'progress' of the age, economic and scientific. He was interested
in, and his thought deeply coloured by, these; but, temperamentally,
he belonged to the aristocratic, martial England of the period
that closed in 1832, and the conflict of his temperament and his
conscientious effort to understand and sympathise with his own age
gave a complex timbre to many of his poems. At heart, he was
an aristocratic Englishman, distrustful of democracy, and dis-
dainful of foreigners and foreign politics, passionately patriotic
and troubled, above all, by a fear that democratic England was
less jealous of her honour than the old, more intent on material
welfare and peace at any price. At heart, he was a Christian in a
quite undogmatic English fashion, a Christian of the old English


## p. 44 (#60) ##############################################

44
[CH.
The Tennysons
rectory and village-church type, rich in the charities and the simpler
pieties, with no touch of Browning's nonconformist fervour, dis-
trustful of Romanising dogmas and ritual, at once interested in,
and profoundly troubled by, the drift of contemporary science
and positivism. The beauties of English rural scenery and
English gardens and villages are woven through and through
the richly coloured tapestry of his poetry. Of his one journey
to Italy he remembered only the discomfort of the rain and the
daisy which spoke to him of England. Even for the dead it is
better to lie in English soil :
we may stand
Where he in English earth is laid,
And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.
And there are no such achievements by sea or land as those of
English sailors and soldiers.
It is not as a thinker or seer that Tennyson will live but as
one of the most gifted and, with Milton and Gray, one of the few
conscientious workmen among English poets. From Claribel to
Crossing the Bar, the claim of his poetry is always the same, the
wonderful felicity with which it renders in vivid picture, in varied
but always dramatically appropriate metre, in language of the most
carefully wrought euphony-no poet since Milton studied as
Tennyson did the finer effects of well adjusted vowels and con-
sonants—the single intense mood in which the poem has been
conceived. He was not a great dramatist, he was not a great
narrative poet. There is a more passionate, winged movement in
the songs of other poets than his, songs that sing themselves more
inevitably. His great achievement is in that class of meditative,
musical, decorative poetry to which belong Milton's L'Allegro
and Il Penseroso, Gray's Elegy, Keats's odes. This is the
type towards which all his poems tend even when they take
different forms and are lyrical or include an element of narrative.
And, if Tennyson has written nothing finer than Milton's or
Keats's poems just named, he has given new qualities to the kind,
and he has extended its range by his dramatic use of the idyll,
the picture of a mood. Compared with Tennyson, Wordsworth,
Shelley and Keats are poets of a single note, nature mystically
interpreted, the sensuous delight of beauty, the desire of the
moth for the star. ' The moods to which Tennyson has given poetic
expression are as varied as his metres, and include a rare feeling
for the beauty of English scenery, the mind of the peasant in many


## p. 45 (#61) ##############################################

] II
His Achievement
45
of its phases, humorous and tragic, the interpretation of classical
legend, the reproduction of the very soul of some Greek and Roman
poets, as Theocritus and Vergil, Lucretius and Catullus, the colour
and beauty, if not all the peculiar ethical and religious tone, of
medieval romance, complexities of mind and even pathological
subtleties of emotion, the brooding of a sensitive spirit over
the riddles of life and death and good and evil. Browning has
a wider range, is less insular, more curious about exotic types
and more subtle in tracing the dialectics of mood and situation.
But he does not enter more intensely into the purely emotional
aspect of the mood, and he does not steep the whole in such a
wealth of colour and melody.
Coming after the great romantics, Tennyson inherited their
achievement in the rediscovery of poetic themes, the purification and
enrichment of English poetic diction, the liberation and enrichment
of English verse, and he uses them all as a conscious, careful artist.
His poetry stands to theirs much as a garden to a natural landscape.
The free air of passionate inspiration does not blow through
it so potently; it lacks the sublimity of sea and moor and the open
heavens. But there are compensations. The beauty of nature is
enhanced by art, the massing of blooms, the varying of effects,
the background of velvet lawn and grassy bank and ordered hedge-
row; above all, by the enrichment of the soil which adds a deeper
crimson to the rose, and blends with simpler blooms the splendours
of the exotic. An imagination rich in colour, a delicate and highly
trained ear, a thought which if not profound was nourished on the
literature and philosophy of Greece and Rome—these were among
Tennyson's gifts to English poetry, and they go a long way to
counterbalance such limitations as are to be found in his thought
and feeling. The peerage conferred on him in 1884 was the
recognition of the greatness of his reputation and the intensely
national spirit of his work.
The name Tennyson may have overshadowed for a time,
in the long run it has given an adventitious interest to, the
work of the poet laureate's brothers, Frederick and Charles.
Frederick went from Louth grammar school to Eton, and from
Eton to Cambridge, where, after a year at St John's college,
he migrated to Trinity where he was joined by his brothers.
He distinguished himself by gaining the Browne medal with a
Greek ode on Egypt. The cadence of the closing lines lingered in
the ears of Sir Francis Doyle all his life: oλλυμένων γάρ, α χθών


## p. 46 (#62) ##############################################

46
[CH.
The Tennysons
6
>
è čaroleitai! But he did not make so strong an impression on
his contemporaries as the younger brothers. The greater part of
his subsequent life was spent in Italy, and the last thirty-five
years in Jersey. At Florence, he came under the influence of
the spiritualistic influences which attracted Mrs Browning and
gave the world Mr Sludge, ‘The Medium'; and in his later
life he became an ardent Freemason and Swedenborgian. He
was a great reader, a student of art and a passionate lover of
music. His first volume of poems Days and Hours was published
in 1854. Thereafter, he published nothing until 1890, when he
issued a long volume of blank verse idylls called The Isles of
Greece, followed, in 1891, by a volume of classical stories, Daphne
and other Poems, and, in 1895, under the title of Poems of the
Day and Year, a selection from the earlier printed poems with
some additions.
Charles Tennyson graduated at Cambridge in 1832 and was
ordained in 1835. On succeeding to a small estate by the will of
a grand-uncle he took the name of Turner. The greater part
of his life was spent as vicar at Grasby in Lincolnshire, where he
cultivated his delicate, meditative verse, writing sonnets on inci-
dents in his daily life, public events, theological topics and other
subjects. He died at Cheltenham in 1879.
Charles Tennyson's poems, with few exceptions, were sonnets,
in the Italian form, but with a fresh set of rimes in the second
quartet of the octave. Fifty were published in 1830 and were
added to, as occasion suggested, till Sonnets, Old and New,
published in 1880, numbered more than three hundred. Not
many of this number reveal the intensity of feeling and per-
fection of form which are essential to the sonnet. Coleridge was
attracted by the young Tennyson's sonnets, as, at an earlier
age, he had been by the not very dissimilar sonnets of Bowles
with their pensive sentiment and occasionally felicitous description.
But, when at his best, Tennyson-Turner is a finer artist than Bowles.
Some of the earlier, indeed, show an uncertain grasp of the form,
the last lines betraying an heroic effort to complete the fourteen
and finish. He wrote too many on occasional themes and
theological polemics. But the best of those inspired by aspects
of natural scenery and simple incidents have the charm of
felicitous workmanship and delicate feeling. The Lattice at
Sunrise, The Buoy-Bell, The Ocean and some others suggest
Wordsworth in a minor key, and Letty's Globe, like the grander
sonnet of Blanco White, is a poem in which art and chance
a


## p. 47 (#63) ##############################################

11]
Frederick Tennyson
47
seem to have combined to produce a poem surprisingly felicitous
alike in conceit and execution.
If Charles Tennyson is a pleasing lesser poet, Frederick strikes
one as a poet in whom the possibility of greater things was never
realised. His character and occasional lines in his work impressed
FitzGerald, who, after 1842, was never a whole-hearted admirer of
the poet laureate's work. “You are now the only man I expect
verse from,' he wrote to Frederick in 1850, “such gloomy, grand
stuff as you write. . . we want some bits of strong, genuine imagina-
tion’; and Browning spoke of him as possessing all the qualities of
his brother Alfred, but in solution. 'One always expected them to
crystallise—but they never did. '
There is certainly more of the large manner about him than
Charles. His imagery, especially his personifications, is more
imaginative; his verse has more of sweep and flow. But he
never took to heart, as Alfred did, the lesson of brevity: 'I felt
certain of one thing then, if I meant to make any mark at all it
must be by shortness, for the men before me had been so diffuse. '
Frederick's classical idylls and narratives are excessively diffuse.
They contain some of his best work, charming description, tender-
ness of feeling-passion they lack as, in some degree, does the
work of all the Tennysons. There is none that would not have
gained by concentration of treatment.
The other notable quality of Frederick Tennyson's poems,
longer and shorter, is a certain abstractness. His love of travel
and a life apart were the index to a certain aloofness and soli-
tariness of soul, not incompatible with a desire for sympathy and
self-expression. Some stanzas called River of Life close with a
confession of this aloofness :
.
River of Life, lo! I have furld my sail
Under the twilight of these ancient trees,
I listen to the water's sleepless wail,
I fill mine ears with sighs that never cease,
If armed hearts come stronger out of ill,
The dust of conflict fills their eyes and ears;
Mine unaccustom'd heart will tremble still
With the old mirth and with the early tears.
He was deeply interested in metaphysical problems. He retells
old myths with the purpose of making them messengers of
his own thought on immortality and the unseen world. But the
message is a little indistinct. Occasionally, as in Psyche, he loses
himself in a Swedenborgian quagmire. There was something of
a mystic in Frederick Tennyson; and his strange, unequal poems


## p. 48 (#64) ##############################################

48
[CH. II
The Tennysons
are the expression of a solitary soul with a certain distinction
of its own.
Nature and love and death and immortality are the
foci round which his thought, as that of his greater brother, moved,
and on each he has written occasional haunting lines :
Oh! thou must weep, and, in the rain
Of tears, raise up the prime
And beauty of thy heart again,
And toil, and fall with time;
And look on Fate, and bear to see
The shadow of Death familiarly.
Thy noblest act is but a sorrow,
To live-though ill befall;
Thy great reward-to die to-morrow,
If God and Nature call;
In faith to reach what ear and eye
Dream not, nor all thy phantasy!


## p. 49 (#65) ##############################################

CHAPTER III
ROBERT BROWNING
AND
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
The best explanation of a poet is to be sought in the best
poem he has written, or in that theme which, at his touch, breaks
out into the amplest music. There, his very self, the personality
which he verily is and which, in a greater or lesser degree, subtly
suffuses all that he does, finds fittest and fullest utterance; and the
utterance itself, whether in phrase or figure, being faithful to fact,
bears that stamp of inevitability which implies perfection.
There is little doubt as to the theme which called forth the
fullness of the powers of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.
It was love. It was love in the same cosmic sense as Wordsworth's
duty, which ‘kept the stars from wrong,' an omnipresent passion for
the best in all nature and in all mankind. To Elizabeth Browning,
there was no truth nor substance, save love. It was the essence
and wholeness of her being, and it expressed itself with unre-
strained prodigality in Sonnets from the Portuguese. Everything
in her life that went before--the beauty of her early home among
the Malverns, the whole practice of her literary industry, the long
lone years of illness and weakness, the heavy sorrow of the death-
stricken home-is taken up, sanctified and dedicated in these poems;
and everything that was to follow was but harvest-gleaning and
aftermath. These sonnets, and, one is tempted to say, these sonnets
only, of all that Elizabeth Browning wrote, the world will in no
wise let go. They are equalled only by her life-in Milton's
sense, they are her life.
Robert Browning cannot be so easily summed and surveyed.
His skill was multifarious far beyond the wont even of great
poets. There was hardly an instrument in the orchestra which
he could not play, his touch was always unique and recognisable;
and, within the domain of human character, there was hardly a
1 Areopagitica.
4
E. L. XIII.
CH. III.


## p. 50 (#66) ##############################################

50
[ch.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
9
bent or trait, a passion or propensity, which he did not celebrate.
Nevertheless, when, like his Arion, he 'gathers his greatness round
him,' and 'stands in state,' and 'harp and voice rend air' with his
full 'magnificence of song! ,' the theme is almost certain to be some
phase of love. And love had the same cosmic, constitutive character
to him, the same, or even greater, moral worth and spiritual
splendour. Speaking of Sonnets from the Portuguese, a critic
has observed with truth that
as pieces of poetry they are not equal to the sonnets of Wordsworth or of
Milton, yet it is not so unreasonable to question whether their removal would
not leave a more irreparable gap in literature 2.
The removal of love from among Browning's themes would be,
original as he was in everything, the removal of his most original,
as well as his most massively valuable, contribution to our literature.
It would have left the poet himself a man without a purpose in
a universe without meaning. Love, in the last resort, was the only
article in his creed. For these reasons, the convergence of these
two lives into unity and their most intimate commingling ever after,
have an artistic meaning no less than an ethical interest, and they
concern the literary critic not less than the biographer. Not that
either of the two poets, when their 'prentice days were over,
was content to be imitative, or could possibly be conceived as
moving in the other's manner. There was no sacrifice of inde-
pendence—there never is when the union is spiritual in character
and complete. They even took precautions against influencing
one another when a poem was in the making. Nevertheless, what
they meant for one another was more subtle and penetrating and
pervasive than any direct and explicit borrowing, over which the
critic could cry ‘Lo here,' or 'Lo there. ' It is more easy to suggest
and to instance than to describe their influence on each other:
but a crowning example, I believe, is to be found in Browning's
Pompilia. There are charms, and, above all, there are intensities,
scattered abroad in The Ring and the Book which would not have
been possible, even for him, had it not been for his 'lyric Love. '
No one was more eager to be dramatical than Browning, or less
willing to expose to a gaping world the pageant of his inner life.
But, after all, a poet dips his pen in his own blood when he writes
what the world must read ; if he be robbed of experience as a man,
he stands more bare as a poet; and, in the experience of both
Robert and Elizabeth Browning, there was one event paramount,
1 Fifine at the Fair.
3 Hugh Walker, The Literature of the Victorian Era.


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>
III ] Robert Browning's Parents 51
one sovereign fact that lent meaning to all that followed. This was
their discovery of one another and the unique perfection of their
wedded life. Criticism of the Brownings and of their meaning to
literature dare not disregard or discount a mutual penetration of
personalities so intense as theirs, but must, in dealing with the
one, be aware that it is dealing with the other as well. In this
respect, what went before in their life and work was but prelimi-
nary, and what came after mere consequent.
Robert Browning was younger than Elizabeth Barrett by some
six years. He was born in Southampton street, Camberwell, on
7 May 1812. His father was a clerk in the bank of England, of
literary and artistic tastes, and his mother the daughter of a Dundee
shipowner of German extraction.
It is more easy to read the acorn in terms of the oak than the
oak in terms of the acorn; and the great man reveals and explains,
rather than is revealed and explained by, the capacities that slum-
bered in his forefathers. While none can deny the heredity of the
features of the soul, any more than those of the body, it is idle to
pretend that the lineaments of a great man's spirit can be traced
back with any degree of accuracy to his ancestors. Every man,
even the most meagre in endowment, has so many ancestors ! But
the psychical structure and propensities of his immediate parents
have a significance all their own: for these define and determine
the environment within which the child's mind lives and moves
and has its being. The home, during the years when, most of all,
the soul is being made, stands to the child for solid earth and
starry firmament, and the influences operative therein are the
air and the food and the drink, and, therefore, the very substance
embodied in his personality. From this point of view, the simple
piety of Browning's mother, her membership of an 'Independent
Church'in Walworth, her life-long class in the Sunday school, her
box for contributions to the London Missionary society lose their
insignificance. In these and other habits, the child saw the spirit
of religion made real and ratified by his mother, and it remained
with him, much modified it is true, but, owing to his mother's memory,
permanently holy and always dominant.
Again, it must not be said that Browning's 'genius was derived
from his father. Genius is not derived. It is always a miracle
and has no history. But the father's genius, that of a lover of art
and of literature, made the son a lover of books and a collector of
them. It led him to write verse—which he did fluently and after
the manner of Pope; and he had a great delight in grotesque
4-2


## p. 52 (#68) ##############################################

52
Browning [ch.
Robert and Browning
Elizabeth Elizabeth
rimes. Moreover, he was so skilful in the use of his pencil that
Rossetti pronounced him to possess 'a real genius for drawing. '
Now, 'the handsome, vigorous, fearless child,' unrestingly active,
fiery of temper, crowded with energy of mind, observant and most
swift to learn, naturally saw all these things and, not less naturally,
imitated the ways of his parents and sought to acquire what they
valued.
In Browning's case, no educational influence counts at all, in
comparison with that of his father's tastes and habits and collection
of books. That influence can be traced in the poet's choice of
themes, all the way from Pauline and Sordello to Parleyings
and A solando, and it even marks his manner of dealing with many
of them. He read voraciously in his father's library, apparently
without let or guidance, and his acquaintance was very early with
the works of Voltaire, the letters of Junius and of Horace Walpole,
the Emblems of Quarles and Croxall's Fables. The first book he
ever bought with his own money was Macpherson's Ossian.
Side by side with this precocious literary omnivorousness
went, from early childhood, careful training in music. I was
studying the Grammar of Music,” he said, according to Mrs Ireland,
'when most children are learning the Multiplication Table. ' More-
over, he was given permission, at an age lower than the rules
allowed, to visit the Dulwich gallery, which was hard by his father's
home. It became 'a beloved haunt of his childhood. '
grateful all his life for the privilege and used to recall, in later
years, the triumphant Murillo pictures,' such a Watteau' and 'all
the Poussins' he had seen there.
The contribution made by school and college to the education
of Browning was even less significant than it has been in the case of
most great poets. His real masters, besides his father and his father's
library in general, were the poets, and especially Byron and Shelley.
'The first composition I was ever guilty of,' he wrote to Elizabeth
Barrett in 1846, 'was something in imitation of Ossian. ' But he
never could ‘recollect not writing rhymes,' though he ‘knew they
were nonsense even then. ' 'It is not surprising,' says Herford,
‘that a boy of these proclivities was captivated by the stormy swing
and sweep of Byron,' and that, as the poet told Elizabeth Barrett,
he 'would have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of
his gloves’; whereas he could not get up enthusiasm enough to
cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge
and Southey were condensed into the little China bottle yonder? '
1 To E. B. , 22 August 1846.
>
6


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>
III) Influence of Byron and Shelley 53
When he was twelve years of age, a collection under the title
Incondita was made of his 'Byronic poems,' and the father would
have liked to publish it. No publisher was found willing, and the
young author destroyed the manuscript. But the poems had been
seen by Eliza Flower (sister of the authoress of the hymn Nearer, my
God, to Thee), who made a copy of them and showed it to W. J. Fox,
editor of The Monthly Repository. According to Browning's state-
ment to Gosse, the editor found in them 'too great splendour of
language and too little wealth of thought,' but, also, a 'mellifluous
smoothness'; and Fox did not forget the boy-poet.
Browning next passed under an influence which was still more
inspiring and intimate. He chanced upon Shelley's Queen Mab on
a bookstall, and became, in consequence of assimilating it, 'a pro-
fessing atheist and a practising vegetarian. ' With some difficulty,
his mother secured for him others of ‘Mr Shelley's atheistical
poems'; and, apparently, through Adonais, he was led to Keats.
In the winter of 1829—30, he attended classes in Greek and Latin,
and, for a very short time, in German, at University college,
London; and, afterwards, Blundell’s lectures in medicine, at Guy's
hospital. Meantime, he carried on his studies in music, and sang,
danced, boxed and rode.
This, if any, was his period of Sturm und Drang-during which,
by the way, he lived on potatoes and bread! He chafed a little
at the social limitations of the home he loved well, and he gave
his
devoted parents a little entirely needless anxiety: his tempera-
ment was buoyant, his soul like a ship crowded with sails, and he
was a venturesome mariner. But his wanderings were of the
imagination, and his 'excesses' were literary both in origin and
in outcome. In truth, all the time, he was living within the
bounds, nay, drawing his strength and his inspiration from those
convictions of the stable things of the world of spirit in the
power of which he went forth, in later days, to challenge, in every
form of joust and tournament and in many an adventure, the forces
of doubt and falsehood and denial and crime. He had not to
suffer in his later life from any treacherous aches of half-forgotten
wounds to character, but faced life sound in every limb and
(one is tempted to add) arrogantly healthy.
The wholesome and wealthy confusion of this seething period of
the young poet's life is faithfully rendered or, rather, betrayed,
in the brilliant and incoherent Pauline-Browning's earliest
published poem. Pauline herself, except for the first half-dozen
lines and a footnote, is the shadow of a shade—the passive


## p. 54 (#70) ##############################################

54
[CH.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
recipient of the psychological confessions of a young poet : a
young poet, who, not at all unaware of his curls and lace and
ruffles, has been turning himself round and round before the mirror,
and has found that he is too noble a being, too bold, reckless,
unrestrained, sceptical, brilliant, intense, wide-souled, hungry for
knowledge and love for this work-a-day world. The self-conscious-
ness is not ‘intense,' as J.