The Age of Tennyson

When we come down to later years the principal change visible in Tennyson’s work is the development of the dramatic element. The dramas proper have been the most neglected of all sections of his work; but ‘the dramatic element’ is by no means confined to them. They are rather just the final result of a process which had been long going on. Tennyson, as we have already seen, gradually put more and more thought into his verse. In doing so he felt the need of a closer grip of reality, and he found, as other poets have found too, that the dramatic mode of conception brought him closest to the real. This is all the more remarkable because nothing could well be more foreign to the dramatic spirit than his early work. His youthful character sketches are not in the least dramatic. Neither is there much trace of humour, a quality without which true dramatic conception is impossible. The change begins to show itself about the middle of the century. In The Grandmother and The Northern Farmer we have genuine dramatic sketches of character. The poet does not regard them from his own point of view, he speaks from theirs. The Northern Farmer is moreover rich in humour. Tennyson never surpassed this creation, but he multiplied similar sketches. All his poems in dialect are of a like kind. They are in dialect not from mere caprice, but because the characters could only be painted to the life by using their own speech. Other pieces, not in dialect, like Sir John Oldcastle and Columbus, are likewise dramatic in their nature. Less prominent, but not less genuine, is the dramatic element in the patriotic ballads, such as The Revenge. The greater part of the work of Tennyson’s last twenty years is, in fact, of this nature, and herein we detect the principal cause of the change of which all must be sensible in that work as compared with the work of his youth. The old smoothness and melody are in great part gone, but a number of pieces prove that Tennyson retained the skill though he did not always choose to exercise it. It is the early style with which his name is still associated, and probably the majority of his readers have never been quite reconciled to the change. But while we may legitimately mourn for what time took away, we ought to rejoice over what it added, rather than left. If there is less melody there is more strength; if the delightful dreamy languor of The Lotos-Eaters is gone, we have the vivid truth of The Northern Farmer and The Northern Cobbler, and the tragic pathos of Rizpah; if the romantic sentiment of Locksley Hall is lost, something more valuable has taken its place in the criticism of life in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.

Tennyson’s dramas then, surprising as they were when they first appeared, are merely the legitimate and almost the inevitable outcome of his course of development. Inevitable he seems to have felt them, for he persevered in the face of censure or half-hearted approval, perhaps it should be said, in the face of failure. A deep-rooted scepticism of his dramatic powers has stood in the way of a fair appreciation. The fame of his earlier poetry has cast a shadow over these later fruits of his genius; and the question, ‘Is Saul also among the prophets?’ was hardly asked with greater surprise than the question whether Tennyson could possibly be a dramatist. And, in truth, at sixty-six he had still to learn the rudiments of his business. Queen Mary (1875) is a failure. It is not a great poem, and still less is it a great drama. The stage is overcrowded with dramatis personæ who jostle each other and hide one another’s features. Harold (1876) showed a marked advance; but Becket (1884) was the triumph which justified all the other experiments. It is a truly great drama, and, though not yet recognised as such, will probably rank finally among the greatest of Tennyson’s works. The characters are firmly and clearly delineated. Becket and Henry, closely akin in some of their natural gifts, are different in circumstances and develop into very different men. Rosamond and Eleanor are widely contrasted types of female character, the former a little commonplace, the latter a subtle conception excellently worked out. All the materials out of which the play is built are great. No finer theme could be found than the mediæval conflict between Church and State; and Tennyson has seized it in the true dramatic way, as concentrated in the single soul of Becket, torn between his duty to the Church and his duty to the King, whose Chancellor and trusted friend he had been and to whom he owed his promotion.

The minor dramatic pieces are of inferior worth, and in some of them, as for example, The Promise of May and The Falcon, Tennyson showed a certain infelicity in his choice of subjects. But their failure leaves unimpaired the interest of the dramatic period. It seemed an almost wanton experiment on the part of Tennyson. But he was an artist all his life, and here too he was only obeying the inherent law of development of his art. Instead of wantonness, there is deep pathos in the old man’s perseverance under unfamiliar conditions, and there can only be joy at his final success. There is surprise too that he who, from his earlier work, would have been judged one of the least dramatic of poets, should have so decidedly surpassed a poet so markedly dramatic as Browning.

Tennyson wrote up to the very close of his long life. His last publications were The Foresters and The Death of Œnone. They show some decline of power. Demeter too (1889) was probably a little below his level. But previous to that, though there had been change, there had been nothing that can be called decay. For the long period of sixty years and upwards Tennyson had written, and with rare exceptions he had written greatly. From the death of Wordsworth to his own death he was almost universally looked upon as the first poet of his time. No one else has wielded so great an influence. In no other poet’s work is the record of change during the period so clearly written. In part he made the age, in still larger measure it made him. The hesitancy of his early work was typical of the spirit of the time. The gradual awakening, the deeper thought, the larger subjects, the more varied interests of the intermediate period, were typical too. In this last period, while Tennyson was as faithful as ever to the law of his own development, he did not move precisely with the time. Another race was rising and other palms were to be won.

Browning could not go through the same phase of development, for in him the intellectual element from the first was even abnormally prominent. Yet in Browning too the influence of the time is felt. Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850) handles topics to which he is perpetually recurring; but in it they are seen in a new light. The poet had heard the noise of the Tractarian controversy, and in Christmas Eve he passes in review the three principal phases of contemporary opinion regarding religion,—the evangelical, represented by the Nonconformist Chapel, the Catholic, represented by Rome, and the critical, represented by the German professor in his lecture-room. It is significant that while Browning can accept neither of the two former, he prefers both to the third. Both are intellectually indefensible, yet in both the vital thing, love, is present, while it is not to be found in the lecture-room. Both ‘poison the air for healthy breathing,’ but the critic ‘leaves no air to poison.’ There is throughout the poem an unquestionable bias towards finding as much true as will by any means pass muster with the intellect. Long afterwards, in La Saisiaz (1878), Browning handled the same problems in a more boldly speculative spirit, though still with the same bias. The difference is largely due to time; for before the date of La Saisiaz Browning had adopted a method more philosophical than artistic. But partly, perhaps, it was due to his wife, who was alive when Christmas Eve was written, and dead long before La Saisiaz.

In the period between these two poems the same problems were frequently in Browning’s mind, and no section of his work is richer in thought and poetic beauty than that which expresses them. In Karshish, with its vivid realisation of the mind of a thoughtful heathen longing for a faith, in A Death in the Desert, where the St. John is rather a man of the age of Strauss than of the first century, in The Pope and in Rabbi Ben Ezra, we have Browning’s deepest treatment of the problems which interested him most, and we have not that sacrifice of poetry to philosophy which mars La Saisiaz. We may say that about this time Browning discovered the vital interest of his generation, and discovered also where his own strength lay. The effect is seen in the uniform excellence of his work. The publications of the twenty years between 1850 and 1870, taken as a whole, certainly surpass what he had done before or what he did afterwards. Men and Women (1855) has been probably the most popular and the most widely read of all his writings; Dramatis Personæ (1864) is even richer in poetry, but has been commonly felt to be more difficult in thought; while The Ring and the Book (1868-1869) is by almost all competent judges pronounced his masterpiece.

The plan of The Ring and the Book, whereby the same story is told ten times over from ten different points of view, is defensible only on the ground that it succeeds. Nearly half the poem is hardly worth reading; yet the other half so splendidly redeems it that The Ring and the Book ranks among the great poems of modern times. The pictures of Caponsacchi, of Guido, of Pompilia and of the Pope are all great. Guido has the interest, unique in this poem, of appearing twice; and there is no better illustration of the subtlety of Browning’s thought than the difference between the Count, plausible, supple and polished, pleading for his life, and the man Guido, stripped of all but bare humanity, condemned to death, first desperately petitioning, then tearing off the veil of hypocrisy and uttering his terrible truths both about himself and the messengers who bear his sentence. Pompilia is Browning’s most perfect female character; but, though a beautiful creation, she illustrates one of the defects in his dramatic art. She speaks Browning’s speech, and she thinks his thought. Simple child as she is, there is a depth of philosophy in her utterances that is not in strict keeping with her character; and she, like all Browning’s men and women, uses the abrupt vivid language of the poet. Notwithstanding his almost passionate repudiation of the idea, Browning is a self-revealing poet; and nowhere does he reveal himself more than in the Pope, the greatest character in The Ring and the Book. In him the resemblance to Browning himself does not matter, it rather adds a new interest. The mind can conceive and picture nothing higher than its own ideal best; and the Pope is Browning’s ideal man, great in intellect, in morals and in faith. In two other cases, Rabbi Ben Ezra and A Death in the Desert, Browning has given similar glimpses of his own ideal, but they are less full than the view we get in The Pope.

To Browning’s middle period belong likewise many of his love-poems, and these are unique in the English language. Others, like Shakespeare and Burns and Shelley, have given a more purely captivating expression to the ardour of love; no one else has so worked out its philosophy. Not that Browning’s poems are deficient in feeling; the expressions of his own love for his wife, ‘O lyric love’ and One Word More, would suffice to refute such a criticism. But he prefers to take an aspect of passion and to explain it by the way of thought. He is analytical. The best example is James Lee’s Wife, which goes through a whole drama of passion, and might be described, like Tennyson’s Maud, as ‘a lyrical mono-drama.’ This, for good or evil, is another method from that of ‘Take, oh take those lips away,’ or ‘I arise from dreams of thee,’ or ‘Of a’ the airts.’ There is both gain and loss in Browning’s way of treatment. On the one hand, the lyric strain is less pure. If poetry ought to be ‘simple, sensuous and impassioned,’ and it has been generally thought that lyric poetry in particular should be so, then is Browning’s less in harmony with the ideal. On the other hand, because his is a new way Browning impresses the reader with his originality; and because it is a thoughtful way he has a wide range. Moreover, it is a purifying and ennobling way. No poet free, as Browning is, from the taint of asceticism has ever treated the passion of love in a manner so little physical as he. There are in his works errors of taste that cause a shudder; but they are not here.

It was likewise during this period that Browning was at his dramatic best. Nearly all his best pieces are dramatic in conception, though sometimes, as in the love-poems, we are confined to single aspects of character. Not to speak of the great figures of The Ring and the Book, there is ample variety in Men and Women and in Dramatis Personæ. There are few figures more clearly drawn or more easily remembered than Andrea del Sarto; and My Last Duchess is equally fine. In these two pieces Browning has succeeded better than elsewhere in keeping himself in the background. Fra Lippo Lippi has likewise the stamp of dramatic truth, and is rich in humour; and Bishop Blougram is at once an excellent character, and, though a satirical conception, the mouthpiece of some serious thought.

In the last twenty years of his life Browning, on the whole, appears at his worst. We have seen how the development of Tennyson, though not unattended with loss, carried with it much compensating gain. There are some indications that Tennyson felt the influence of his great contemporary. The metrical effects of his later poems, as well as the studies of character, are sometimes suggestive of Browning. It would have been well if Browning had in turn borrowed a few hints from Tennyson; but unfortunately he went steadily along his own course, bringing into ever greater prominence characteristics that rather needed repression. He should have nourished the artistic rather than the intellectual element. Instead, the former dwindled and the latter grew; and some of his later writings may be not unfairly described as merely treatises in verse. Such is Fifine at the Fair (1872); such is La Saisiaz (1878); such are many parts of Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884), and of the Parleyings with Certain People of Importance (1887). Such too is Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871); for there the dramatic conception of Louis Napoleon is smothered beneath the arguments of the Saviour of Society. In all of these the philosophy overloads the poetry, a state of matters all the less satisfactory because the philosophy itself is not so sound as that of the earlier periods.

There is nevertheless some fine work belonging to this late period. The translations from the Greek are interesting; but their value is outweighed by that of the beautiful romance of Balaustion, in which they are set, and by the discussion of the principles of art in Aristophanes’ Apology (1875). Still better is The Inn Album (1875), remarkable for the magnificent character of the heroine, and for some of the most powerful reasoning to be found in Browning’s works. His last volume, Asolando (1889), will always have a special interest for its publication coincidently with his death; and it illustrates how his favourite ideas remained fixed to the end. There is nothing more characteristic of him than the thought that evil is necessary to the evolution of good. We can trace this all through his work. It is present in Sordello, where we find evil described as ‘the scheme by which, through ignorance, good labours to exist;’ and the poet even modifies the prayer, ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ because, if we are strong enough to overcome it, the temptation will only do us good. It is indeed Bishop Blougram whom he causes to speak of ‘the blessed evil;’ but Browning could consistently have used the phrase himself. Nowhere is this doctrine, at first so strange, yet so suggestive, more fully and clearly expressed than in the poem Rephan in Asolando. Earth is superior to Rephan just because evil blended with good is better than ‘a neutral best,’ and it is progress to move from the sphere where wrong is impossible to one where through the risk of evil, and often through evil itself, a higher good may be attained.

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

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

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

(1806-1861).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward FitzGerald

(1809-1883).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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