Edward Augustus Freeman, who was a little younger than Buckle and survived him for thirty years, had some points in common with the historian of civilisation, though his education, interests, and tone in reference to religion were wholly different. Mr. Freeman, who was not at any public school but was a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, very soon devoted himself to the study of early English history, and secured a durable position by his elaborate _History of the Norman Conquest_ (1867-76), which, even though the largest and most important, was only one among scores of works, ending in an unfinished _History of Sicily_.
He was, when he died in 1892, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and he had for many years been very influential in determining the course of historical study. He was also, for many years of his life, an active journalist, being especially known as a contributor to the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, and he sometimes took a very busy part in politics.
Mr. Freeman was a student of untiring energy, and will always deserve honourable memory as the first historian who recognised and utilised the value of architecture in supplying historical doc.u.ments and ill.u.s.trations. His style was at times picturesque but too diffuse, and disfigured by a habit of allusion as teasing as Macaulay"s ant.i.thesis or Kinglake"s stock phrases. That he was apt to p.r.o.nounce very strong opinions on almost any question with which he dealt, was perhaps a less drawback to his excellence as a historian than the violently controversial tone in which he was wont to deal with those who happened to hold opinions different from his own. Putting defects of manner aside, there is no question that, for his own special period of English history (the eleventh and twelfth centuries), Mr. Freeman did more than any man had done before him, and as much as any man has done for any other period; while in relation to his further subjects of study, his work, though less trustworthy, is full of stimulus and of information.
His chief pupil John Richard Green, who was born in 1837 and died of consumption in 1883, was a native of Oxford, and was educated there at Magdalen College School and Jesus College. Mr. Green, like Mr. Freeman, was a frequent contributor to the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, and did some clerical duty in the east of London; but he is best known by his historical work on English subjects, especially the famous _Short History of the English People_, perhaps the most popular work of its cla.s.s and kind ever written. Mr. Green professed, on a principle which had been growing in favour for some time, to extend the usual conception of historical dealing to social, literary, and other matters. These, however, had never as a fact been overlooked by historians, and the popularity of the book was chiefly due to its judicious selection of interesting facts, to the spirit of the narrative, and to the style, based partly on Macaulay, but infused with a modernness which exactly hit the taste of the readers of our time. Mr. Green afterwards expanded this book somewhat; and his early death cut short a series of more extended monographs, _The Making of England_, _The Conquest of England_, etc., which would have enabled him to display the minute knowledge on which his more summary treatment of the general theme had been based.
Among historians to whom in larger s.p.a.ce more extended notice than is here possible would have to be given, perhaps the first place is due to Philip Henry, sixth Earl Stanhope (1805-75), who (chiefly under the t.i.tle of Lord Mahon, which he bore before his succession to the earldom in 1855) was an active historical writer of great diligence and impartiality, and possessed of a fair though not very distinguished style. The first notable work,--a _History of the War of the Succession in Spain_ (1832),--of Lord Stanhope (who was an Oxford man, took some part in politics, and was a devoted Peelite) was reviewed by Macaulay, and he wrote later several other and minor historical books. But his reputation rests on his _History of Europe from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles_, which occupied him for some twenty years, finishing in 1854. Very much less known to the general, but of singular ability, was William Johnson or Cory, who under the earlier name had attracted considerable public attention as an Eton master and as author of a small but remarkable volume of poems called _Ionica_. After his retirement from Eton and the change of his name, Mr. Cory amused himself with the composition of a _History of England_, or rather a long essay thereon, which was very little read and falls completely out of the ordinary conception of such a book, but is distinguished by an exceptionally good and scholarly style, as well as by views and expressions of great originality. Many others must pa.s.s wholly unnoticed that we may finish this chapter with one capital name.
One of the greatest historians of the century, except for one curious and unfortunate defect, and (without any drawback) one of the greatest writers of English prose during that century, was James Anthony Froude, who was born at Dartington near Totnes in 1818, on 23rd April (Shakespeare"s birthday and St. George"s Day), and died in 1894 at the Molt near Salcombe in his native county. Mr. Froude (the youngest son of the Archdeacon of Totnes and the brother of Richard Hurrell Froude who played so remarkable a part in the Oxford Movement, and of William Froude the distinguished naval engineer) was a Westminster boy, and went to Oriel College, Oxford, afterwards obtaining a fellowship at Exeter.
Like his elder brother he engaged in the Tractarian Movement, and was specially under the influence of Newman, taking orders in 1844. The great convulsion, however, of Newman"s secession sent him, not as it sent some with Newman, but like Mark Pattison and a few more, into scepticism if not exactly negation, on all religious matters. He put his change of opinions (he had previously written under the pseudonym of "Zeta" a novel called _Shadows of the Clouds_) into a book ent.i.tled _The Nemesis of Faith_, published in 1849, resigned his fellowship, gave up or lost (to his great good fortune) a post which had been offered him in Tasmania, and betook himself to literature, being very much, except in point of style, under the influence of Carlyle. He wrote for _Fraser_, the _Westminster_, and other periodicals; but was not content with fugitive compositions, and soon planned a _History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada_. The first volumes of this appeared in 1856, and it was finished in 1869. Meanwhile Froude from time to time collected his essays into volumes called _Short Studies_, which contain some of his very best writing. His next large work was _The English in Ireland_, which was published in three volumes (1871-74). In 1874-75 Lord Carnarvon sent him on Government missions to the Cape, an importation of a French practice into England which was not very well justified by the particular instance. Between 1881 and 1884 he was occupied as Carlyle"s literary executor in issuing his biographical remains. Later _Oceana_ and _The English in the West Indies_ contained at once sketches of travel and political reflections; and in 1889 he published an Irish historical romance, _The Two Chiefs of Dunboy_. He was made Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in succession to Mr. Freeman, and his two latest works, _Erasmus_, published just before, and _English Seamen_ some months after his death, contain in part the results of the appointment.
It is a vulgar observation that the natural element of some men appears to be hot water. No English author of the century justifies this better than Mr. Froude. His early change of faith attracted to him a very considerable share of the obloquy which usually (and perhaps not so unreasonably as is sometimes thought) attaches to violent revolutions of opinion on important points. His _History_ was no sooner published than most acrimonious attacks were made upon it, and continued for many years, by a school of historical students with the late Mr. Freeman at their head. His Irish book, coinciding with the rise of "Home Rule"
sentiment in Ireland, brought upon him furious enmity from the Irish Nationalist party and from those who, at first or by and by, sympathised with them in England. His colonial visits and criticisms not merely attracted to him the animosity of all those Englishmen who espoused the politics of non-intervention and non-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt, but aroused lively irritation in the Colonies themselves. About his discharge of his duties as Carlyle"s executor, a perfect tempest of indignation arose; it being alleged that he had either carelessly, or through bad taste, or with deliberate treachery, revealed his dead friend"s and master"s weaknesses and domestic troubles to the public view.
With some of the causes of this odium we are fortunately here dispensed from dealing. Theological and political matters, in so far as they are controversial, are altogether outside of our scope. The question of the dealing with Carlyle"s "Remains" is one rather of ethics than of literature proper, and it is perhaps sufficient to make, in reference to it, the warning observation that Lockhart, who is now considered by almost all competent critics as a very pattern of the union of fidelity and good taste towards both his subject and his readers, was accused, at the appearance of his book, of treachery towards Scott.
But it must be confessed that if Mr. Froude"s critics were unfair (and they certainly were) he himself gave only too abundant opening to fair criticism. That his first great book (not perhaps any of his others) was planned on an unduly large scale, and indulged in far too extensive dissertation, divagation, and so forth, was rather the fault of his time than of himself. Grote and Macaulay had obtained, the first considerable, the latter immense popularity by similar prolixity; and Carlyle was about, in the _Frederick_, to follow the fashion. But whereas all these three, according to the information open to them, were and are among the most painfully laborious researchers and, with a fair allowance, the most faithful recorders among historians, Mr. Froude displayed an attention to accuracy which his warmest admirers must allow to be sadly, and which enemies a.s.serted to be scandalously insufficient.
He has been called by well-affected critics "congenitally inaccurate,"
and there is warrant for it. Nor did any one of his three great models come short of him in partiality, in advocacy, in the determination to make the reader accept his own view first of all.
He was, in the earlier part of his career at any rate, a very poor man, whereas Macaulay was in easy, and Grote in affluent circ.u.mstances, and he had not Carlyle"s Scotch thrift. But the carelessness of his dealing with doc.u.ments had more in it than lack of pence to purchase a.s.sistance, or even than lack of dogged resolve to do the drudgery himself. His enemies of course a.s.serted, or hinted, that the added cause was dishonesty at the worst, indifference to truth at the best. As far as dishonesty goes they may be summarily non-suited. The present writer once detected, in a preface of Mr. Froude"s to a book with which the introducer was thoroughly in sympathy, repeated errors of quotation or allusion which actually weakened Mr. Froude"s own argument--cases where he made his own case worse by miscitation. To the very last, in his _Erasmus_ itself, which he had prepared at some pains for the press, his work would always abound in the most astonishing slips of memory, oversights of fact, hastinesses of statement. There is probably no historian of anything like his calibre in the whole history of literature who is so dangerous to trust for mere matters of fact, who gives such bad books of reference, who is so little to be read with implicit confidence in detail. Had his critics confined themselves to pointing this out, and done him justice in his other and real merits, little fault could have been found with them. But it is impossible not to see that these merits were, at least in some cases, part of his crime, in the eyes of those who did not like him; in others were of a kind which their natural abilities did not qualify them to detect.
The first of these merits--the least it may be in some eyes, not so in others--was a steadfast, intense, fiery patriotism, which may remind us of that which Macaulay in a famous pa.s.sage has ascribed to Chatham in modern times and to Demosthenes of old. This quality differed as much from the flowery and conventional rhetoric not uncommon in writers of some foreign nations, as from the smug self-satisfaction which was so frequent in English speakers and authors of his own earlier time. No one probably of Mr. Froude"s day was less blind to English faults than he was; no one more thoroughly grasped and more ardently admired the greatness of England, or more steadfastly did his utmost in his own vocation to keep her great.
His second excellence--an excellence still contested and in a way contestable, but less subject than the first to personal and particular opinion--was his command of the historic grasp, his share of the historic sense. I have seen these terms referred to as if they were chatter or claptrap; while the qualities which they denote are very often confounded with qualities which, sometimes found in connection with them, may exist without either. The historic sense may be roughly described as the power of seizing, and so of portraying, a historic character, incident, or period as if it were alive not dead; in such a manner that the fit reader, whether he is convinced or not that the things ever did happen, sees that they might and probably must have happened. Some of the most estimable and excellent of historians have not had even a glimmering of this sense: they have at best laboriously a.s.sembled the materials out of which, sooner or later, some one with the sense will make a live history. But Thucydides and Herodotus had it; Tacitus had it, and even Sall.u.s.t; it betrays itself in the most artless fashion in Villehardouin and Joinville, less artlessly in Comines; Clarendon had it; Gibbon had it; Carlyle had it as none has had it before or since. And Mr. Froude had it; not much less though more fitfully than Carlyle. It is not in the least necessary to agree with his views; it is possible to regard his facts with the most anxious suspicion. You may think that the case made out for King Henry is pretty weak, and the case made out against Queen Mary is much weaker. But Mr.
Froude is among the rare Deucalions of historic literature: he cannot cast a stone but it becomes alive.
Thirdly, and still rising in the scale of incontestability, though even so contested, I believe, by some, is the merit of style. I have sometimes doubted whether Mr. Froude at his best has any superior among the prose writers of the last half of this century. His is not a catching style; and in particular it does not perhaps impress itself upon green tastes. It has neither the popular and slightly brusque appeal of Macaulay or Kinglake, nor the unique magnificence of Mr.
Ruskin, nor the fretted and iridescent delicacy of some other writers.
It must be frankly confessed that, the bulk of his work being very great and his industry not being untiring, it is unequal, and sometimes not above (it is never below) good journey-work. But at its best it is of a simply wonderful attraction--simply in the pure sense, for it is never very ornate, and does not proceed in point of "tricks" much beyond the best varieties of the latest Georgian form. That strange quality of "liveliness" which has been noticed in reference to its author"s view of history, animates it throughout. It is never flat; never merely popular; never merely scholarly; never merely "precious" and eccentric.
And at its very best it is excelled by no style in this century, and approached by few in this or any other, as a perfect harmony of unpretentious music, adjusted to the matter that it conveys, and lingering on the ear that it reaches.
NOTE.--As examples of the almost enforced omissions referred to in the text may be mentioned earlier Archdeacon c.o.xe, the biographer of Marlborough and the historian of the House of Austria; later, Finlay (1799-1875), the valiant successor of Gibbon, and the chronicler of the obscure and thankless fortunes of the country called Greece, after it had ceased to be living. Professor Sir J. R. Seeley, Kingsley"s successor at Cambridge (1834-94), equally distinguished in his professional business, and as a lay theologian in a sense rather extra-orthodox than unorthodox; and Sir John Stirling-Maxwell, no mean historian either in the general sense or in the special department of Art. It is open to any one to contend that each and all of these as well deserve notice as not a few dealt with above; yet if they were admitted others still could hardly be excluded.
CHAPTER VI
THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD
The second period of English poetry in the nineteenth century displays a variety and abundance of poetical accomplishment which must rank it very little below either its immediate predecessor, or even the great so-called Elizabethan era. But it is distinguished from both these periods, and, indeed, from almost all others by the extraordinary predominance of a single poet in excellence, in influence, and in duration. There is probably no other instance anywhere of a poet who for more than sixty years wrote better poetry than any one of his contemporaries who were not very old men when he began, and for exactly fifty of those years was recognised by the best judges as the chief poet of his country if not of his time.
Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809 at Somersby, in Lincolnshire, where his father, a member of a good county family, was rector. He was the third son, and his two elder brothers, Frederick and Charles, both possessed considerable poetical gifts, though it cannot be said that the _Poems by Two Brothers_ (it seems that it should really have been "three"), which appeared in 1826, display much of this or anything whatever of Alfred"s subsequent charm. From the Grammar School of Louth the poet went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was contemporary, and in most cases intimate, with an unusually distinguished set of undergraduates, many of whom afterwards figured in the famous Sterling Club (see chapter iv). He also did what not many great future poets have done, he obtained the Chancellor"s prize for English verse with a poem on "Timbuctoo," where again his special note is almost, though perhaps not quite, absent: it appears faintly and fitfully in another juvenile poem not formally published till long afterwards, "The Lover"s Tale."
It was in 1830 that he made his first substantive appearance with a book of _Poems_. This volume was afterwards subjected to a severe handling by the poet in the way of revision and omission--processes which through life he continued with such perseverance and rigour, that the final critical edition of him, when it appears, will be one of the most complicated of the kind in English literature. So did he also with another which appeared two years (or a little more) later. It is not therefore quite just to judge the criticism which these books received, by the present condition of the poems which figured in them; for though most of the beauties were there then, they were accompanied by many defects which are not there now. Criticism, however, was undoubtedly unfavourable, and even unfair. Although Tennyson was not, either at this time or at any other, a party politician, the two great Tory periodicals, the _Quarterly Review_ and _Blackwood"s Magazine_, were still animated, the former by a dislike to the Romantic school in poetry, the latter by a dislike to "c.o.c.kneys"--though how anybody could have discovered a c.o.c.kney in Tennyson may seem marvellous enough.
Accordingly Lockhart in the one and Wilson in the other fell foul (though in Wilson"s case, at least, not indiscriminately) of work which beyond all question offered very numerous and very convenient handles, in ways which will be mentioned presently, to merely carping criticism.
Some attempts at reply were made by the poet"s friends, notably A. H.
Hallam, but the public did not take to him, and even well-affected and competent older judges, such as Coleridge, expressed very qualified admiration.
But during the next decade, in which he gave himself up silently to the task of perfecting his art, attempting no profession or literary occupation of profit, and living (partly in London, partly in the country at High Beach and elsewhere) with extreme simplicity and economy on his own small means and a pension which was provided for him, the leaven of an almost fanatical admiration was spreading among readers of his own age or a little younger. And his next publication, a new issue of _Poems_ in 1842--containing the final selection and revision of the others already mentioned, and a large reinforcement of admirable work--was received, not indeed with the popular avidity which had been displayed towards Scott and Byron in the generation before, and which revived in the case of his own later work, but with an immense enjoyment by almost all true lovers of poetry. Even Wordsworth, the most ungracious critic of other men"s work in his own art of whom the history of literature gives record, acknowledged Tennyson in the amplest terms.
This was, as has been hinted above, exactly fifty years before his death, and though in the first of these five decades the pudding if not the praise was still rather scanty, his reputation waxed steadily and never waned. To keep for the present to chronicle in biography and bibliography, he published in 1847 the exquisite "medley" of _The Princess_, his first attempt at a poem of any length. 1850 was a great year in his career, for in it he published the collection of elegiacs on his friend Arthur Hallam, in which some have seen his most perfect work, and he became Poet Laureate. Three years later he bought a house at Farringford, near Freshwater in the Isle of Wight, which was for the rest of his life his occasional and, until 1870 (when to avoid intrusion he built himself another at Aldworth near Haslemere), his main house.
His poetry now was beginning to bring in some profit, the editions of it multiplying every year; and during the last thirty years of his life, if not more, he was probably at least as richly provided with mere gold as any poet has ever been. He was, however, never seduced into hasty writing; and he never gave himself to any other occupation save poetry, while during his entire life he was a hater of what is commonly called society. In 1855 there appeared _Maud_, the reception of which seemed at first something of a relapse in welcome, which was in its first form open to some criticism, and which he touched up to one of the finest as a whole, as it was in parts one of the most pa.s.sionate and melodious of his works. But the _Idylls of the King_, the first and best instalment of which appeared in 1858, completely revived even his popular vogue, and made him indeed popular as no poet had been since Byron. It was said at the time that 17,000 copies of _Enoch Arden_, his next volume (1864), were sold on the morning of publication.
For the rest of his life his issues were pretty frequent, though the individual volumes were never large. A series of dramas beginning with _Queen Mary_ in 1875, and continuing through _Harold_, _The Falcon_, _The Cup_, the unlucky _Promise of May_, _Becket_, and _The Foresters_, though fine enough for any other man, could be better spared by his critical admirers than any other portion of his works. But the volumes of poems proper, which appeared between 1864 and his death, _Lucretius_, _Tiresias_, the successive instalments of the _Idylls_, _Locksley Hall Sixty Years After_, _Demeter_, _The Death of Oenone_, and perhaps above all the splendid _Ballads_ of 1880, never failed to contain with matter necessarily of varying excellence things altogether incomparable--one of the last, the finest and fortunately also the most popular, being the famous "Crossing the Bar," which appeared in his penultimate, but last not posthumous, volume in 1889. He died at Aldworth in October 1892, and was buried with an unequalled solemnity in Westminster Abbey.
In the case of no English poet is it more important and interesting than in the case of Tennyson, considering the excellence of his own work in the first place, and the altogether unparalleled extent of his influence in the second, to trace the nature and character of his poetical quality. Nor is this difficult, though strange to say it has not always been done. In his very earliest work, so soon as this quality appeared at all, it is to be discovered side by side with other things which are not native. Undoubtedly the tradition which, in the general filiation of English poetry, connects Tennyson with Keats, is not wholly wrong.
In many of the weaker things, and not a few of the better, of the volumes of 1830 and 1832, there is to be seen both the wonderful music which Keats attained by a combination of the cla.s.sical and romantic appeals--the appeals which in his own case are singly exhibited at their best in the "Grecian Urn" and in "La Belle Dame sans Merci,"--and the sometimes faulty and illegitimate means which Keats took to produce this effect. But to any one who compares rationally (and it may be permitted to remark parenthetically, that nothing seems to be more misunderstood than the comparative point of view) the difference between Keats and Tennyson will emerge at once. Both being great poets, there is the inexplicable in both; while as Keats undoubtedly died before he had any chance of applying to his own powers and products the unequalled process of clarifying and self-criticism which went on with Tennyson in the ten years" silence between the second of the volumes just mentioned and his issue of 1842, it is impossible to say that Keats himself could not have done something similar. Nothing that he ever did is worse in point of "gush," of undisciplined fluency, of mistakes in point of taste and of other defects than the notorious piece about "the darling little room,"
on which the future Poet Laureate"s critics were so justly severe; while in the single point of pa.s.sion it is very doubtful whether Tennyson ever approached the author of "La Belle Dame sans Merci." There was not perhaps much to choose between the two in their natural power of a.s.sociating pictorial with musical expression; while both had that gift of simple humanity, of plain honest healthy understanding of common things, the absence of which gives to Sh.e.l.ley--in some ways a greater poet than either of them--a certain unearthliness and unreality.
But Tennyson had from the first a wider range of interest and capacity than Keats, and he had the enormous advantage of thorough and regular literary training. No poet ever improved his own work as Tennyson did; nor has any, while never allowing his genius to be daunted by self-comparison with his predecessors, had such a faculty of availing himself of what they had done without copying, of seeing what they had not done and supplying the gap himself. And besides this he had the inexplicable, the incommunicable, the unique, the personal gift. In the very earliest things, in "Claribel," in "Mariana," in the "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," in the "Ode to Memory," in the "Dirge," in the "Dying Swan," in "Oriana," there is even to those who were born long after they were written, even to those who have for years sedulously compared them with almost all things before and with all things since, the unmistakable note of the new, of the new that never can be old. It is there in the rhythms, it is there in the phrase. The poet may take things that had previously existed--the Keatsian and Sh.e.l.leian lyric, the Wordsworthian att.i.tude to Nature, the Miltonic blank verse; but inevitably, invariably, each under his hands becomes different, becomes individual and original. The result cannot be accounted for by mannerisms, from which at no time was Tennyson free, and after the thousands and ten thousands of imitations which have been seen since, it stands out untouched, unrivalled.
In the next instalment this quality of intense poetical individuality strengthened and deepened. As we read "The Two Voices," "Oenone," "The Palace of Art," "The Lotos Eaters," "A Dream of Fair Women," it becomes almost incomprehensible how any one who ever read them even in forms less perfect than those that we possess, should have mistaken their incomparable excellence. But the student of literary history knows better. He knows that nearly always the poet has to create his audience, that he sings before the dawn of the day in which he is to be sovereign.
And then with the 1842 book came practically the completion of Tennyson in the sense of the indication of his powers. Edward FitzGerald, as is elsewhere noticed, thought, or at least said, that everything his friend had done after this was more or less a declension. This is a common and not an ign.o.ble Fallacy of Companionship--the delusion of those who have hailed and accompanied a poet or a prophet in his early struggles. It is not even wholly a fallacy, inasmuch as, in the case of the cla.s.s of poets to which Tennyson belongs, there does come a time when the rest of the products of their genius is so to speak _applied_: it ceases to reveal them in new aspects. They do not repeat themselves; but they chiefly vary. Now came the magnificent "Morte D"Arthur" (the "Idylls of the King" in microcosm, with all their merits and none of their defects), "St. Simeon Stylites," "Ulysses," "Locksley Hall," "St. Agnes"
Eve," and other exquisite things; while to this period, as the subsequent arrangement shows, belong not a few, such as "t.i.thonus" and "The Voyage," which were not actually published till later, and in which keen observers at the time of their publication detected as it were an older ring, a more genuine and unblended vintage.
It is not improper therefore to break off here for a moment and to endeavour to state--leaving out the graces that can never be stated, and are more important than all the others--the points in which this new excellence of Tennyson differed from the excellences of his forerunners.
One of them, not the least important, but the least truly original, because something distantly resembling it had been seen before in Keats and Sh.e.l.ley, is the combined application of pictorial and musical handling. Not, of course, that all poets had not endeavoured to depict their subjects vividly and to arrange the picture in a melodious frame of sound, not that the best of them had not also endeavoured to convey, if it were possible, the colours into the sense, the sense into the music. But partly as a result of the natural development and acquired practice of the language, partly for the very reason that the arts both of painting and music had themselves made independent progress, most of all, perhaps, because Tennyson was the first poet in English of the very greatest genius who dared not to attempt work on the great scale, but put into short pieces (admitting, of course, of infinite formal variety) what most of his forerunners would have spun into long poems--the result here is, as a rule, far in advance of those forerunners in this respect, and as an exception on a level with the very best of their exceptions. With Shakespeare there is no comparison; Shakespeare can send to every poet an "O of Giotto" in his own style to which that poet must bow. But of others only Spenser had hitherto drawn such pictures as those of the "Palace" and the "Dream," and Spenser had done them in far less terse fashion than Tennyson. Only Keats, Sh.e.l.ley, Coleridge, Blake, perhaps Beddoes, and a few Elizabethans had poured into the veins of language the ineffable musical throb of a score of pieces from "Claribel" to "Break! Break!" and not one of them had done it in quite the same way. Only Milton, with Thomson as a far distant second, had impressed upon non-dramatic blank verse such a swell and surge as that of "Oenone." And about all these different kinds and others there clung and rang a peculiar dreamy slow music which was heard for the first time, and which has never been reproduced,--a music which in "The Lotos Eaters," impossible as it might have seemed, adds a new charm after the _Faerie Queen_, after the _Castle of Indolence_, after the _Revolt of Islam_ to the Spenserian stanza, which makes the stately verses of the "Palace" and the "Dream" tremble and cry with melodious emotion, and which accomplishes the miracle of the poet"s own dying swan in a hundred other poems all "flooded over with eddying song."
But there is something more to be noted still. The poet had caught and was utilising the spirit of his time in two ways, one of them almost entirely new. That he constantly sang the subjective view of nature may be set down to the fact that he came after Wordsworth, though the fact that he sang it without the Wordsworthian dryness and dulness must be set down to his own credit. But in that sense of the history of former times which is perhaps the chief glory of the nineteenth century in matters of thought he had been antic.i.p.ated by no one. He might not have attained it without Scott and Byron, but his expression of it was hardly conditioned in the very slightest degree by the expression either of Byron or of Scott. They were not in strictness men of the nineteenth century; he was, and he represented the very best features of his time in attending, from its point of view mainly, to the features of better times.
But if FitzGerald"s dictum were taken in the sense that Tennyson"s poetical career might, with advantage or with anything but the greatest possible loss, have been closed in 1842, then certainly it would be something more than a crotchet. Nothing perhaps appeared subsequently (with unimportant exceptions such as the plays, and as the dialect pieces of which the "Northern Farmer" was the first and best) the possibility of which could not have been divined from the earlier work.
The tree had blossomed; it had almost, to keep up the metaphor, set; but by far the greater part of the fruit was yet to ripen, and very much of it was to be of quality not inferior, of quant.i.ty far greater, than anything that had yet been given.
_The Princess_ and _In Memoriam_, the two first-fruits of this later crop, were certainly not the least important. Indeed they may be said to have shown for the first time that the poet was capable of producing, in lighter and severer styles respectively, work not limited to short flights and exemplifying what (perhaps mistakenly) is called "thought,"
as well as style and feeling, colour and music. _The Princess_ is undoubtedly Tennyson"s greatest effort, if not exactly in comedy, in a vein verging towards the comic--a side on which he was not so well equipped for offence or for defence as on the other. But it is a masterpiece. Exquisite as its author"s verse always is, it was never more exquisite than here, whether in blank verse or in the (superadded) lyrics, while none of his deliberately arranged plays contains characters half so good as those of the Princess herself, of Lady Blanche and Lady Psyche, of Cyril, of the two Kings, and even of one or two others. And that unequalled dream-faculty of his, which has been more than once glanced at, enabled him to carry off whatever was fantastical in the conception with almost unparalleled felicity. It may or may not be agreed that the question of the equality of the s.e.xes is one of the distinguishing questions of this century; and some of those who would give it that position may or may not maintain, if they think it worth while, that it is treated here too lightly, while their opponents may wish that it had been treated more lightly still. But this very difference will point the unbia.s.sed critic to the same conclusion, that Tennyson has. .h.i.t the golden mean; while that, whatever he has. .h.i.t or missed in subject, the verse of his essay is golden, no one who is competent will doubt. Such lyrics as "The splendour falls" and "Tears, idle tears," such blank verse as that of the closing pa.s.sage, would raise to the topmost heights of poetry whatever subject it was spent upon.
_In Memoriam_ attacked two subjects in the main,--the one perennial, the other of the time,--just as _The Princess_ had done. The perennial, which is often but another, if not an exclusive, word for the poetical, was in the first case aspirant and happy love, in the other mourning friendship. The ephemeral was, in the latter, the sort of half doubting religiosity which has occupied so much of the thought of our day. On this latter point, as on the other just mentioned and on most beside, the att.i.tude of Tennyson was "Liberal-Conservatism" (if political slang may be generalised), inclining always to the Conservative rather than to the Liberal side, but giving Liberalism a sufficient footing and hearing. Here again opinions may be divided; and here again those who think that in poetry the mere fancies of the moment are nothing may be disposed to pay little attention to the particular fancies which have occupied the poet. But here again the manner, as always with real poets, carries off, dissolves, annihilates the special matter for poetical readers. Tennyson had here taken (not invented) a remarkable and not frequently used stanza, the iambic dimeter quatrain with the rhymes not alternated, but arranged _a b b a_. It is probable that if a well-instructed critic had been asked beforehand what would be the effect of this employed with a certain monotone of temper and subject in a book of some three thousand lines or so, he would have shaken his head and hinted that the substantive would probably justify its adjective and the monotone become monotonous. And if he had been really a deacon in his craft he would have added: "But to a poet there is nothing impossible." The difficulty was no impossibility to Tennyson. He has not only, in the rather more than six score poems of this wonderful book, adjusted his medium to a wide range of subjects, all themselves adjusted to the general theme, but he has achieved that poetic miracle, the communication to the same metre and to no very different scheme of phrase of an infinite variety of interior movement. There is scarcely a bad line in _In Memoriam_; there are few lines that do not contain a n.o.ble thought, a pa.s.sionate sentiment, a beautiful picture; but there is nothing greater about it than the way in which, side by side with the prevailing undertone of the stanza, the individual pieces vary the music and accompany it, so to speak, in duet with a particular melody. It must have been already obvious to good ears that no greater master of English harmonics--perhaps that none so great--had ever lived; but _In Memoriam_ set the fact finally and irrevocably on record.
_Maud_ was the third, and perhaps it may be said to have been, on a great scale, the last experiment in thus combining the temporal with the eternal. It was also probably the weakest as a whole, though the poet had never done more poetical things than the pa.s.sage beginning, "Cold and clear-cut face"; than the prothalamium, never to have its due sequel, "I have led her home"; than the incomparable and never-to-be-hackneyed "Come into the garden"; or than the best of all, "Oh! that "twere possible." It may even be contended that if it were ever allowable to put the finger down and say, "Here is the highest,"
these, and not the best things of the 1842 volumes, are the absolute summit of the poet"s effort, the point which, though he was often near it, he never again quite reached. But the piece, as a whole, is certainly less of a success, less smooth and finished as it comes from its own lathe, than either _The Princess_ or _In Memoriam_. It looks too like an essay in compet.i.tion with the "Spasmodic School" of its own day; it drags in merely casual things--adulteration, popular politics, and ephemera of all kinds--too a.s.siduously, and its characterisations are not happy. There is a tradition that the poet met a critic, and a very accomplished critic too, who was one of his own oldest friends, and said, "What do you mean by calling _Maud_ vulgar?" "I didn"t," said the critic, quite truly. "No, but you meant it," growled Tennyson. And there was something of a confession in the growl.
But these slight relapses (and, after all, what sort of a relapse is it which gives us not merely the incomparable things referred to, but others hardly less exquisite?) never, in the great writers, serve as anything but retreats before an advance; and certainly, in a sense, the _Idylls of the King_ were an advance, though not, perhaps, in all senses. No total so brilliant, so varied within a certain general unity, so perfectly polished in style, so cunningly adjusted to meet the popular without disappointing the critical ear, had ever come from Tennyson"s pen as the first quartet of Idylls, _Enid_, _Vivien_, _Elaine_, and _Guinevere_. No such book of English blank verse, with the doubtful exception of the _Seasons_, had been seen since Milton. Nothing more adroitly selected than the contrast of the four special pieces--a contrast lost to those who only read them in the completed Arthuriad--has been often attempted or ever achieved. It is true that the inner faithful, the sacred band of Tennysonians, old and young, grumbled a little that polish had been almost too much attended to; that there was a certain hardish mannerism, glittering but cold, about the style; that there was noticeable a certain compromise in the appeal, a certain tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of the sail to the popular breeze. These criticisms were not entirely without foundation, and they were more justified than their authors could know by the later instalments of the poem, which, the latest not published till twenty-seven years afterwards, rounded it off to its present bulk of twelve books, fifteen separate pieces, and over ten thousand lines. Another, more pedantic in appearance, but not entirely dest.i.tute of weight, was that which urged that in handling the Arthurian story the author had, so to speak, "b.a.s.t.a.r.dised it," and had given neither mediaeval nor modern sentiment or colouring, but a sort of amalgamation of both. Yet the charm of the thing was so great, and the separate pa.s.sages were so consummate, that even critics were loth to quarrel with such a gift.
The later instalments of the poem--some of them, as has been said, very much later, but still so closely connected as to be best noticed here--were of somewhat less even excellence. It was an inevitable, but certainly an unfortunate thing, that the poet republished the magnificent early fragment above noticed in a setting which, fine as it would have been for any one else, was inferior to this work of the very best time. Some of the lighter pa.s.sages, as in _Gareth and Lynette_, showed less grace than their forerunners in _The Princess_; and in _Pelleas and Ettarre_ and _Balin and Balan_ the poet sometimes seemed to be attempting alien moods which younger poets than himself had made their own. But the best pa.s.sages of some of these later Idylls, notably those of _The Holy Grail_ and _The Last Tournament_, were among the finest, not merely of the book, but of the poet. Nowhere has he caught the real, the best, spirit of the legends he followed more happily; nowhere has he written more magnificent verse than in Percivale"s account of his constantly baffled quest and of Lancelot"s visit to the "enchanted towers of Carbonek."
Far earlier than these, _Enoch Arden_ and its companion poems were something more of a return to the scheme of the earlier books--no very long single composition, but a medley of blank verse pieces and lyrics, the former partly expansions of the scheme of the earlier "English Idyll," the latter various and generally beautiful; one or two, such as "In the Valley of Cauterets," of the most beautiful. Here, too, were some interesting translations, with the dialect pieces above referred to; and all the later volumes, except those containing the plays, preserved this mixed manner. Their contents are too numerous for many to be mentioned here. Only in the _Ballads and Other Poems_ was something like a distinctly new note struck in the two splendid patriotic pieces on "The Last Fight of the _Revenge_" and the "Defence of Lucknow,"
which, even more than the poet"s earlier "Charge of the Light Brigade,"
deserve the t.i.tle of the best English war-songs since Campbell; in "Rizpah," an idyll of a sterner and more tragic kind than anything he had previously attempted; and in the "Voyage of Maeldune," this last in some respects the most interesting of the whole. For the marvellous power which great poets possess of melting, of "founding," so to speak, minor styles and kinds of poetry to their own image, while not losing a certain character of the original, has never been shown better than here. Attention had, even before the date of this poem, been drawn to the peculiar character of early Celtic poetry,---not the adulterated style of Ossian, but the genuine method of the old Irish singers. And, since, a whole band of young and very clever writers have set themselves, with a mixture of political and poetical enthusiasm, the task of reviving these notes if possible. They have rarely succeeded in getting very close to them without mere archaic pastiche. Tennyson in this poem carried away the whole genius of the Celtic legend, infused it into his own verse, branded it with his own seal, and yet left the character of the vintage as unmistakable as if he had been an Irishman of the tenth century, instead of an Englishman of the nineteenth. And indeed there are no times, or countries, or languages in the kingdom of poetry.
A very little more may, perhaps, still be said about this great poet,--great in the character and variety of his accomplishment, in the volume of it, and, above all, in the extraordinarily sustained quality of his genius and the length of time during which it dominated and pervaded the literature of his country. The influences of Pope and Dryden were weak in force and merely external in effect, the influence of Byron was short-lived, that of Wordsworth was partial and limited, in comparison with the influence of Tennyson. Of this, as of a mere historical fact, there can be no dispute among those who care to inform themselves of the facts and to consider them coolly. Of his intrinsic merit, as opposed to his influential importance, it is not of course possible to speak so peremptorily. Among the great volume of more or less unfavourable criticism which such a career was sure to call forth, two notes perhaps were the most dominant, the most constant, and (even fervent admirers may admit) the least unjust. He was accused of a somewhat excessive prettiness, a sort of dandyism and coquetry in form, and of a certain want of profundity in matter. The last charge is the more unprofitable in discussion, for it turns mainly on vast and vague questions of previous definition. "What is thought?" "What is profundity?" a by no means jesting demurrer may object, and he will not soon be cleared out of the way. And it will perhaps seem to some that what is called Tennyson"s lack of profundity consists only in a disinclination on his part to indulge in what the Germans call the _Schwatzerei_, the endless, aimless talkee-talkee about "thoughtful"
things in which the nineteenth century has indulged beyond the record of any since what used to be called the Dark Ages. On the real "great questions" Tennyson was not loth to speak, and spoke gravely enough; even to the ephemeralities, as we have said, he paid rather too much than too little attention. But he did not go into the ins and outs of them as some of his contemporaries did, and as other contemporaries thought fitting. He usually neglected the negligible; and perhaps it would not hurt him with posterity if he had neglected it a little more, though it hurt him a little with contemporaries that he neglected it as much as he did.
The charge of prettiness is to be less completely ruled out; though it shows even greater mistake in those who do more than touch very lightly on it. In the earliest forms of the earlier poems not seldom, and occasionally in even the latest forms of the later, the exquisiteness of the poet"s touch in music and in painting, in fancy and in form, did sometimes pa.s.s into something like finicalness, into what is called in another language _mignardise_. But this was only the necessary, and, after he was out of his apprenticeship, the minimised effect of his great poetical quality--that very quality of exquisiteness in form, in fancy, in painting, and in music which has just been stated. We have, it must be admitted, had greater poets than Tennyson. Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Sh.e.l.ley, undoubtedly deserve this preference to him; Wordsworth and Keats may deserve it. But we have had none so uniformly, and over such a large ma.s.s of work, exquisite. In the lighter fantastic veins he may sometimes be a little unsure in touch and taste; in satire and argument a little heavy, a little empty, a little rhetorical; in domestic and ethical subjects a little tame. But his handlings of these things form a very small part of his work. And in the rest none of all these faults appears, and their absence is due to the fact that nothing interferes with the exquisite perfection of the form. Some faults have been found with Tennyson"s rhymes, though this is generally hypercriticism; and in his later years he was a little too apt to acc.u.mulate tribrachs in his blank verse, a result of a mistaken sense of the true fact that he was better at slow rhythms than at quick, and of an attempt to cheat nature. But in all other respects his versification is by far the most perfect of any English poet, and results in a harmony positively incomparable. So also his colour and outline in conveying the visual image are based on a study of natural fact and a practice in transferring it to words which are equally beyond comparison. Take any one of a myriad of lines of Tennyson, and the mere arrangement of vowels and consonants will be a delight to the ear; let any one of a thousand of his descriptions body itself before the eye, and the picture will be like the things seen in a dream, but firmer and clearer.
Although, as has been said, the popularity of Lord Tennyson itself was not a plant of very rapid growth, and though but a short time before his position was undisputed it was admitted only by a minority, imposing in quality but far from strong in mere numbers, his chief rival during the latter part of their joint lives was vastly slower in gaining the public ear. It is not quite pleasant to think that the well-merited but comparatively accidental distinction of the Laureateship perhaps did more even for Tennyson in this respect than the intrinsic value of his work. Robert Browning had no such aid, his verse was even more abhorrent than Tennyson"s to the tradition of the elders, and until he found a sort of back-way to please, he was even more indifferent to pleasing. So that while Tennyson became in a manner popular soon after 1850, two decades more had to pa.s.s before anything that could be called popularity came to Browning. It is, though the actual dates are well enough known to most people, still something of a surprise to remember that at that time he had been writing for very nearly forty years, and that his first book, though a little later than Tennyson"s, actually appeared before the death of Coleridge and not more than a few months after that of Scott. Browning, about whose ancestry and parentage a good deal of mostly superfluous ink has been shed, was born, the son of a city man, on 7th May 1812, in the, according to the elder Mr. Weller, exceptional district of Camberwell. He was himself exceptional enough in more ways than one. His parents had means; but Browning did not receive the ordinary education of a well-to-do Englishman at school and college, and his learning, though sufficiently various, was privately obtained.
_Pauline_, his first poem, appeared in 1833, but had been written about two years earlier. He did not reprint it in the first general collection of his verse, nor till after his popularity had been established; and it cannot be said to be of great intrinsic excellence. But it was distinctly characteristic:--first, in a strongly dramatic tone and strain without regular dramatic form; secondly, in a peculiar fluency of decasyllabic verse that could not be directly traced to any model; and, thirdly, in a certain quality of thought, which in later days for a long time received, and never entirely lost from the vulgar, the name of "obscurity," but which perhaps might be more justly termed breathlessness--the expression, if not the conception, of a man who either did not stop at all to pick his words, or was only careful to pick them out of the first choice that presented itself to him of something not commonplace.