are probably more generally read than any of these. He has left some fine sonnets; and his Glasgow is a splendid poem, written in praise of a city which has received few tributes in song. Of less importance are Richard Harris Barham (1788–1845), whose Ingoldsby Legends (1837) are cunningly rhymed masterpieces in the grotesque; and Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton (1805-1885), the friend of Tennyson, the Mr. Vavasour of Disraeli's Tancred, and critic, poet, and one of the great social figures of his day. CHAPTER XXXI VICTORIAN POETRY Tennyson, the Brownings, Swinburne, William Morris, Rossetti, James WHEN we pass from the poets of the transition, the first Tennyson great name we encounter is that of Alfred, Lord Tennyson -Early (1809-1892), who represents at once a development of the Poems. earlier Romanticism and a notable reaction against it. Much even of his earlier poetry displays a richness and sensuous beauty of colour which puts him in close touch with Keats. In 1829 he won the Chancellor's prize at Cambridge with his poem Timbuctoo; in 1830 appeared his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. Most of these, as Oriana and The Merman, display a certain wistfulness of cadence and feeling, combined with a strong and sometimes exaggerated sense of the value of detail in the creation of beauty. Tennyson's touch on poetry is here faltering and uncertain: it has become far surer in The Lady of Shalott and Other Poems (1832), which contained, besides the name-poem, such master's work as Oenone, The Palace of Art, The Lotus-Eaters, and A Dream of Fair Women. Lady of Shalott, a symbolic rehandling of the tale of Lancelot and Elaine, is his first, and one of his most beautiful, essays in the Arthurian Legend, which he subsequently wished to compress within the compass of a musical masque, and eventually developed more fittingly in The Idylls of the King. The Two Voices, and, to some extent, The Palace of Art, display in a form tinged with youthful despondency, that eager questioning of life which was later to take more virile and various shape in the great fabric of In Memoriam. The poems of 1832, although they were savagely and unwisely attacked in certain quarters, immediately won for Tennyson the consideration of some of the most representative minds of his day, including natures so diverse as Carlyle, FitzGerald, and John Stuart Mill. The The No further volume was published till the year 1842, which saw the production of two volumes, English Idylls and Enoch Arden and Other Poems. These represent a notable development in Tennyson's genius, for in the words of his biographer and son, there was now a marvellous abatement of my father's real fault-the tendency, arising from the fullness of a mind which had not learnt to master its resources freely, to overcrowd his compositions with imagery, to which may be added over-indulgence in the luxury of the senses'. Morte d'Arthur, subsequently to be developed into The Passing of Arthur, shows Tennyson's mind strongly at work on Malory and the older Arthurian romances. Ulysses, Tithonus, and Lucretius display his growing mastery of blank verse, together with that high and Vergilian dignity of expression and acute sensitiveness to all beauty of form and feeling, which, in combination, make him one of the chief English inheritors of the classical spirit. Locksley Hall represents the old wistfulness and disillusion which were to recur in Maud and to be partially resolved in In Memoriam. The Princess, a lengthy 'blank verse lyric to use TennyPrincess. son's own term for it-on the subject of Woman's Rights, was originally published in 1847, but is now chiefly prized for the exquisite incidental lyrics which were added to it in 1850. In Memoriam. In Memoriam, published in 1850, had been begun in 1833, the year which had seen the death of Arthur Hallam, the gifted and well-beloved friend whose memory it celebrates. Full of vivid scenery and portraiture, and containing passages of perfect lyric beauty, it ranks with Lycidas and Adonais as one of the classic elegies in our language, and is also a great autobiographical and philosophic poem. It shows a human soul at handgrips with the deepest and darkest problems of life, and embodies the attitude towards religion not only of a man but of a whole generation. A comparison between it and The Prelude shows clearly how far Tennyson has moved from Wordsworth's envisagement of Nature, and how strongly his outlook has been coloured by the age in which he wrotethe age of Lyell and Darwin and Huxley. Huxley, indeed, remarked of him that he was the first poet since Lucretius who had taken the trouble to understand the scientific point of view; and his conception of Nature as red in tooth and claw', like the intuition of her embodied in Arnold's Sonnet to a Preacher, agrees with Huxley 1 in regarding her as a ruthless force who was not the ally but the foe of the human soul in its striving for spiritual and physical salvation. We are a far way here from the conception of her as Healer and Revealer embodied in the Lines Written above Tintern Abbey. Yet Tennyson, despite his moods of black despondency, does not, like Vigny, despair utterly of Nature and of life, but pours forth in poignant language the aspiration of his soul for some 1 Cf. Huxley's Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics. 1 form of spiritual existence which shall transcend the present order, and enable him to regain his friend. Some, especially those of the younger generation, have found the philosophy and faith of In Memoriam commonplace and unsatisfying, and certainly Wordsworth scaled spiritual heights on whose foot-hills Tennyson had barely trod; but no dissatisfaction of this kind can be allowed to discount the superb beauty of description and reminiscence which runs throughout the poem. In 1855 Tennyson published Maud, a lyric romance embody. Maud. ing a psychology essentially modern. Both the characterization and the lyric expression of this poem are uneven, and the invective against society with which it opens is overwrought and rhetorical, for Tennyson's gloom nowhere achieves the cosmic sublimity of Vigny's or Leopardi's; but there is much fine work in Maud, and critics should never forget that the very strain in it which some of them denounce as 'morbid', produced one at least of the loveliest lyrics that Tennyson ever wrote. In The Idylls of the King Tennyson recurs to the theme The Idylls which had attracted him strongly both before and after the of the publication of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere and The Lady of King. Shalott. The series began with the beautiful Morte d'Arthur, which was written before 1835, originally published in 1842 as one of the English Idylls, and republished as the conclusion of The Idylls of the King under the name of The Passing of Arthur. Fresh idylls appeared at intervals from 1859 (Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere) to 1885 (Balin and Balan). In its final form, the series comprises twelve tales of the Round Table, each written in blank verse. In the main Tennyson keeps to the version of Malory with recourse to the Mabinogion and such early romances as the metrical Morte Arthure; but he has freely remoulded the old legends to the shape and fashion of his formidably decorous age, and it must frankly be confessed that much of the glamour of Malory has vanished in the process. Nowhere is this more lamentably the case than in Guinevere, where the queen's guilty yet heroic love for her knight dwindles at the end into a half-hearted reversion to her sermonizing lord and king, and thus prevents Tennyson from portraying the far more beautiful and spiritual renunciationscene between Lancelot and Guinevere, which, as described by Malory, is one of the greatest passages in English prose. In The Last Tournament, again, Tennyson adopts the less poetic and tragic version of Tristram's death, and altogether fails to do justice to the spirit of the old romance. Yet, despite all objections-and many more might be added-the Idylls are not ignobly conceived or wrought, and, at their best, as in The Passing of Arthur, they contain work inferior to nothing in Tennyson. In 1850 Tennyson was made Laureate in succession to Words- His later worth, and in 1852 he wrote his first official ode of importance, Poems. His Plays. celsus. that On the Death of the Duke of Wellington. A quite different handling is evident in Tennyson's poems of pastoral life, some of which, as The Northern Farmer, are written in dialect, others, as The May Queen, in ordinary English. A powerful tragic poem in this class is Rizpah, which received the passionate praise of Swinburne. Certain of Tennyson's other poems, as Locksley Hall Sixty Years After and Vastness, embody a deepening and a variation of the faith of In Memoriam, and a still keener sense of the poignant antinomy between faith and science. Of his plays the most important are Queen Mary (1875), Harold (1876), Becket (1879), The Falcon and The Cup (1884). The first three of these represent an attempt to revive the old English history play, and to make it hold the English stage, which, except for a few brief revivals, had hardly known it since the day of Elizabeth. Both Harold and Becket contain fine character drawing: Becket is strongly dramatic. Tennyson begun to write poetic drama in his prime he might have done very great things indeed. Had Browning With Tennyson the writing of plays came late, and was -Pauline induced by his practice of the dramatic poem. With Robert and Para- Browning (1812-1889) the sequence is reversed; his dramas come early, and it is only after passing from them to the dramatic poem that he achieves his full strength. It is noteworthy, too, that whereas much of Tennyson's best work-for instance, In Memoriam-is personal and confessional, Pauline (1833), which is Browning's earliest publication, and is described by him as a 'fragment of a confession', represents a way of writing to which he seldom returned. Dramatic in form, it is really an essay in self-revelation; and self-revelation, at least of the direct variety, subsequently became distasteful to him. Pauline shows the influence of Shelley, whom it praises as the 'Sun-treader'. Paracelsus (1835) is a far greater achievement. It is a study in the character of the famous sixteenth-century Swiss philosopher and charlatan, who, as recreated by Browning, finds after years of intellectual striving that his life has been thwarted through lack of the human charity and love vouchsafed to his friend, the poet Aprile. This early poem foreshadows Browning's later practice of developing a great conception through the workings of a human soul. The central idea itself, and Paracelsus's conviction that the struggle of his earthly life will find fruition in a future state, also anticipate much that was to come in Browning's later work. This splendid poetic dialogue is an astonishing Sordello, production for a man of twenty-three. Sordello, though it did not appear till 1840, was conceived and partially written before the publication of Paracelsus. It deals with the lifetragedy of the young Guelf poet whose name it bears, and shows the ideal triumphing over ambition, though at the cost of life. itself. It is one of the most difficult among English poems, yet contains passages of great beauty. In 1837 Browning's first play, Strafford, was produced by His Plays. Macready at Covent Garden, but only ran for five nights. Browning was not disheartened, and during the next eight years produced six fresh dramas, King Victor and King Charles (1842), The Return of the Druses (1843), A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (1843), Colombe's Birthday (1844), Luria and A Soul's Tragedy (1846). None of these plays has had any striking success on the stage, though the most popular of them, A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, has been occasionally revived. If their failure proves that Browning had an imperfect mastery of the theatrical, it also suggests that early Victorian audiences had an imperfect sense of the dramatic. The plays, it must be admitted, are too wordy, and in some cases they elaborate character to the detriment of plot; yet Henry and Mildred, Djabal and Anael, the tragic lovers of A Blot in the 'Scutcheon and The Return of the Druses, might well appear dramatic even beneath the cheap scrutiny of the limelight. Less able to bear this test, but secure by every higher one, is the exquisitely idealized figure of Luria; and the plays contain other unforgettable characters, such as Colombe and Chiappino, whose story, like his life, has its first half poetry and its second prose. Somewhat apart from the plays proper lies Pippa Passes His great a set of dramatic scenes showing how the song of a passing girl, dramatic who is enjoying a holiday from her task work, enters and alters Poems. the lives of those who hear it. Pippa contains some perfect poetry, and one, at least, of the most dramatic passages ever penned by Browning. In this class, too, may be reckoned In a Gondola (1842) and the later In a Balcony, dramatic dialogues which contain some of Browning's greatest lyric and tragic work. But if his genius was intensely dramatic, it was also, in the strength of its ethical and metaphysical conviction, intensely self-conscious; hence his perfect form of expression was not the dramatic dialogue, which curbs self-consciousness, but the dramatic monologue or lyric, which gives it freer play. Browning had already attempted this form in two volumes, Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), which, with his six plays, complete the full series of Bells and Pomegranates, and contain such splendid work as Porphyria's Lover, Waring, The Flight of the Duchess, and the first draft of Saul. They were followed by Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850), which discusses the human and superhuman truths underlying orthodox religion; and by Men and Women (1855), which, with Dramatis Personae (1864) and The Ring and the Book (1868-69), represents the finest flower of Browning's achievement. The first two volumes |