THE POETRY OF THE PERIOD, EEPRINTED FROM THE TEMPLE BAR" MAGAZINE. THE POETRY OF THE PERIOD BY ALFRED AUSTIN, AUTHOE OF THE SEASON: A SATIBE ;" "THE HUMAN TRAGEDY," ETC. LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET, JjubUsjjtt ht i$ Volume is WITH EVERY EXPRESSION OF ADMIRATION AND FRIENDLY REGARD. ROME, February, 1870. CONTENTS. PAGE ME. TENNYSON 1 ME. BEOWNING 38 ME. SWINBUENE 77 ME. MATTHEW AENOLD. ME. MOEEIS . '. 118 BOMAN CATHOLIC POETS 156 THE POETEY OF THE FUTUEE . . . .192 SUPEENATUEAL POETEY 224 SUMMAEY 259 THE POETRY OF THE PERIOD. JF one were to enter a modern draw- ing-room filled with the average polite society of the day, and then and there were to pluck up courage to declare that Mr. Tennyson has no sound pre- tensions to be called a great poet, and will of a certainty not be esteemed such by an unbiassed posterity, I suppose he would not create more astonishment, or be regarded more unanimously as a heretic, than would another who in a company of savans expressed his doubts as to the law of gravitation, or a third who, before a committee of orthodox divines, exposed his utter disbelief in the inspiration of the Scriptures. Yet that, and nothing less, is the opinion to be The Poetry of the Period. expounded in the ensuing pages, with a con- fidence equal to that I feel upon any subject I could name a confidence not the growth of yesterday, but of long, deliberate, and ever- deepening conviction. It is indeed high time that somebody should speak out what is, to my knowledge, distinctly in the minds of an inde- pendent few, and, I have reason to suspect, hazily in the minds of the servile many. The age in which we live is, in the formation of opini@n, if not absolutely in the expression of it, such an oppressive one, the conventional sense of the majority so overpowers the critical sense of the discriminating minority, that when an opinion has, in the phraseology of the day, once " turned the corner " and got itself accepted by a pre- ponderance of voices, it is almost hopeless to think of reversing it. So hopeless is it that, as a rule, no one ever expends his energy in the attempt; or, if he does, his spoken or written efforts are relegated to the obscure pages of some neglected publication, which either expires of its eccentricity, or obtains a licence of vitality by surrendering its independence of judgment, and proclaiming in a still more extravagant key the sentiments it began by struggling to stem. So Tennyson. has it been by the national estimate formed of Mr. Tennyson. It would not be easy to name the precise moment at which, it was settled once and for all that he is a great poet, though I am inclined to think that the period might be marked by the publication of the " Idylls of the King." The point, however, is not one of very great importance, except as showing as I shall have occasion to point out farther on that his fame has steadily increased precisely as his genuine poetical power has steadily waned. What I wish to emphasize at present is, that his being a great poet is now regarded as an established fact. It is esteemed to be beyond the reach of criticism, and the vulgar suppose that nobody for a moment dreams of challenging it. I am going not only to challenge it, but to deny it altogether, and to implore the age, whilst there yet is time, to save itself by a seasonable recantation from the posthumous ridicule and contempt in which a conventional persistence in an untenable opinion of permanent interest will necessarily involve it. We are so perniciously given in these days to extravagance of all sorts, and notably to extra- vagance of language so frivolously addicted to excessive censure and unmeasured laudation The Poetry of the Period. that all sense of accuracy seems to be deserting us. Ten years ago, anything that pleased, from a bonnet to an epic, was te charming." Five years ago, it was " so charming." Now it is "too charming/' I mention these phrases as illustrative, and as proving the stringent ne- cessity of calling the reader's attention to what it is exactly that is asserted, and what it is exactly that is denied. My proposition is, that Mr. Tennyson is not a great poet, unquestionably not a poet of the first rank, all but unquestionably not a poet of the second rank, and probably though no contemporary perhaps can settle that not even at the head of poets of the third rank, among whom he must ultimately take his place. The prevailing or universally expressed opinion on the subject is, that he is a great poet, a very great poet, perhaps as great a poet as ever lived, the latchet of whose shoe Dryden would not be worthy to tie ; greater than Scott, greater than Shelley, greater than Keats, greater than Words- worth, greater than Byron yes, ever so much greater than Byron certainly as great as Milton or Spenser, and only not quite named in the same breath with Shakespeare, because the self- same mingled academical and drawing-room conven- Tennyson. tionality, which places him in a sphere prepos- terously beyond his real deserts, allows nobody to be par aid secundus to our mighty dramatist. I do not mean to say that in the second instance conventionality, and sound criticism are not at one'; but if the latter had not succeeded in com- ' pelling the adherence of the former already, and before Mr. Tennyson's claims had been mooted, I entertain no doubt whatever that even Shake- speare's superiority would not have been safe against the ignorant intrusion into his society by the Poet Laureate's worshippers of their paraded idol. But short of Shakespeare, it is certain there is no English bard with whom they do not presume continually to compare him, and almost invariably to the disadvantage of the mighty dead. This is the opinion I challenge and denounce the opinion that will make" posterity shriek with laughter and flout us with scorn. Nobody, I presume, will contest the state- ment that no man can make himself a great poet by writing a large quantity of mediocre poetry, or a certain quantity of unsurpassable excellence in expression. Otherwise two men of very different merit, Blackmore and Gray, would both be great poets. Just as in Eoman Catholic The Poetry of the Period. theology no amount of venial sins will constitute one mortal one, so according to the canons of poetry no amount of pretty, beautiful, tender, elegant, thoughtful verse, can constitute its author a mighty singer. If Mr. Tennyson be a great poet, where is his great subject greatly sung? Where is his " Hamlet," his "Lear," his ff Faery Queen," his " Paradise Lost," his " Prometheus Unbound," his " Cenci," his " Cain," his " Manfred," his " Childe Harold," ay, his " Endymion," or his " Marmion ?" He had his great subject once, and once only, and, in vulgar parlance, he ' ' funked " it. What has he made of his ' ' Flos Regum Arthurus ? " Four* exquisite cabinet pictures ; but that is all. You prefer cabinet pictures ? Be it so. But neither four, nor forty, nor four hundred of them, con- stitute a magnum opus, or their producer a mighty artificer, or in any sense the peer of one who is. If "King Arthur" and the "Table Round" could not, under favourable circumstances, be woven into the substance of a really great poem, never was the subject that could. No doubt Mr. Tennyson is as well aware of that fact as any- body ; and the consciousness of it governed him * Now extended to eight. Tennyson. in his original selection of it. He kept revolving it for years, in tke fond hope that a due poetic treatment of it would make his laurelled head, strike the stars ; but eventually he had to own that he was unequal to the glorious task. The subject was too much for him. Non ex quovis ligno fit Mercurius. The stuff of a great poet was not in him; and he confessed as much perhaps not quite consciously, but still, we may be sure, with a pang of mortification, when he abandoned a lofty but illusory aim, and contented himself with executing four charming and highly finished fragments or driblets, in the shape of " Enid," " Elaine," " Vivien," and " Guinevere." Never was there a poet with such sound judg- ment and good common sense as Mr. Tennyson. He takes, and has always taken, his own measure far more accurately than his silly and immoderate admirers. He has never yet attempted anything beyond his reach; and the consequence is, he has never conspicuously failed. But is it not he himself who reminds us that " He is all fault who hath no fault at all" ? The same holds good of the small poet, whom unwise voices want to proclaim great. There is The Poetry of the Period. no really great poet that has not written unmiti- gated nonsense, perpetrated notable fiascos that does not, in a word, abound with faults. Where are Mr. Tennyson's faults ? He has only one the fault of not being great enough to commit any. He has what Mr. Carlyle has so happily described as " the completeness of a limited mind." He never stumbles, for he never runs. He never flags, because he never soars. He never rises into air too rarefied for him, as Shelley does air so light and fine that even wings do not there support him. He knows what he can do, and he does it. It is delicate, subtle, pathetic, sometimes even solemn; it is anything else you like ; but it is never great. It is not the purpose of this present paper to note what Mr. Tennyson is, but rather what he is not. Yet the second point cannot well be established without the first being, to a certain degree, entertained. His first little volume of poems, published in 1830, could not by any possibility, even in the worst and most uncritical of times, have made a poetical reputation ; and, whatever folks now affect to think of them, they were thought very little of when they first appeared. Byron had been dead only six years Tennyson. we fear he would have poked shocking fun at them, with their Adelines, Madelines, and Lilians, had he been alive and the generation that had fed on his strong meat was not prepared all of a sudden to smack its lips over food for babes. Yet there was genuine poetry in one or two of them of course of a rather small sort, and though happy twists of expression were more noticeable in them than any more substantial quality. But, besides betokening in the author an airy fancy and a rare delicacy of touch, they prompted the expectation of something better than themselves. That something better very decidedly better came two years later. There was still a rather namby-pamby ' ' sweet pale Margaret," recalling the Madelines and Adelines of the previous volume ; but there were likewise the " Dream of Fair Women/' the " Palace of Art," " (Enone," and the "Lotos Eaters;" and what was more important to most people, and is to this day, there were in it " New Year's Eve," the " Miller's Daughter," and "Lady Clara Yere de Yere." There could be no doubt in any reasonable mind that the author was a poet, and a poet of no mean order. Ten years passed away; and in 1842 came the " Talking Oak," Locksley Hall," io The Poetry of the Period. and those blank verse English Idylls which sounded the key-note of nearly all Mr. Tennyson's la/fcest and more extensive poetic labours. He has added no fresh poetic laurels, in kind, to his brow since that date. As far as quality is con- cerned, there are to be found in those first three volumes, now published as one under the simple name of " Poems/' types of everything he has since written, and types equal to anything that has followed. I am not forgetting " Maud "* the weakest and worst, despite its several beauties, of Mr. Tennyson's works nor " In Memoriam/-' in the opinion of many people, though certainly not in mine, his strongest and best. " Maud" is a pot pourri of his various manners, each of which is plainly discernible in some one page or other of the " Poems." The * In an article written by a distinguished French critic iu the " Revue des Deux Mondes," February 15, 1869, entitled " Un Retour vers Byron," occurs the following passage: "Aujourd'hui meme les 'admirables passages de Byron contre la guerre n'ont rien perdu de leur puissance. Aujourd'hui Maud est a peu pres oublie'; ou est toujours transporte des chaudes peintures de la prise d'lsma'il. La verite seule est durable, et Byron 1'a ren- contree." These remarks are by M. Louis Etienne ; but if the reader wishes to see what the impartial " foreign friend" thinks of Mr. Tennyson, let him read M. Taine. In fact, Mr. Tennyson is only an English poet, and never will be anything more. That is another note of his comparative inferiority. Tennyson. 1 1 key of "In Memoriam" was first struck in the verses beginning, "You ask me why, though ill at ease/' published in 1832. But I take 1842 as the climacteric. No higher note has been struck by Mr. Tennyson since, and by far his best notes have since then wholly deserted him. It is pretty certain that no posterity, however distant, will allow the "Talking Oak," or "Locksley Hall" to die ; but the English Idylls, if they survive far into the next century, will survive in an academical sense only, as Thomson's " Sea- sons," or Young's "Night Thoughts" do now. "In Memoriam" will assuredly be handed over to the dust as soon as a generation arises which has come to its senses, or even to a tolerable notion of what it is aiming at, in religious and spiritual thought. Passages no doubt will be saved, as they will from " Maud," and from the " Idylls of the King," but their very survival will doom the text from which they are selected to practical oblivion. As for the " Princess," such is even already its fate. Its pretty little songs and a well-known passage at the close of the poem are being perpetually quoted, only to prove what a trivial impression, if ary, has been created in the general mind by its other innumerable 12 The Poetry of the Period. pages. All of them alike are already manifestly destined to be, as complete poems, to dumb for- getfulness a prey ; and all of them for the same reason their length, though by no means ex- cessive when poems of any pretension are spoken of, is so conspicuously greater than their ex- cellence. Their weight is too much for their momentum, and consequently they will fall short and soon. If you want to be heard afar off, you must shout, not loud or long, but high. Mr. Tennyson's poetical pitch is not high enough he cannot make it high enough and the in- evitable consequence is that posterity will not hear him, save in little snatches or breaks of voice, as it still hears Cowley or Falconer. Still if it could be shown that Mr. Tennyson though he has written no single great work, no one poem sufficiently sublime in conception and execution to defy the destructiveness of Time has given frequent or even occasional utterance to really great poetical thoughts, or to poetical images really sublime, it might perhaps . be impossible, and it would certainly be churlish, to refuse him the title, by courtesy at least, of a great poet. It is true that single-speech Hamil- ton does not usually figure in the list of English Tennyson. 13 orators, nor is Earl Russell regarded as a famous epigrammatist, because he once made the ex- ceedingly happy remark that proverbs are the wisdom of many and the wit of one. Neverthe- less, though I could not waive the important point on which I have been insisting, I would not press it, if sublimity of idea could be indi- cated as ever and anon rising out of the usually tame and scarcely undulating level of Mr. Tenny- son's compositions. But, with an intimate ac- quaintance with everything he has written, and after long and deliberate "reflection and search, I have no hesitation in saying that, in the whole range of his poetry, there is not to be found even a solitary instance of a sublime thought sublimely expressed. In really great poets in Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley such thoughts crowd upon us thick and fast pelt us, in fact, with their prodigal frequency. They smite us, stun us, take away our breath, make us bow our heads and wonder, fancying that we have seen over into the other world had a glimpse of the supernatural, a flash of the Eternal. But Mr. Tennyson ! He is sweet, tender, touching, polished his is the perpolita oratio a gentle- man, a scholarly writer, a more highly- finished 14 The Poetry of the Period. oneself, so to speak, but never the man " who has seen Hell," or any of the non-visible things of the universe. He is not even the gran maestro, of whom anybody can say " da cui io tolsi Lo bello stile che m' ha fatto onore," Many have imitated him, it is true, and most successfully ; but who has gained special honour by it ? Names need not be mentioned ; anybody can suggest them for himself; but his metrical disciples have been so numerous, have copied their original so amazingly well, and their ex- cellence in this respect has been the subject of such general remark, that Mr. Tennyson has thereby been betrayed into one of the few un- dignified acts of his singularly self-respecting and honourable life. Unwisely stung by the observation that his works were objectionably easy of imitation, he has retorted in some stupid little verses to the effect that all can grow the flower now that they have got the seed, which came originally from his garden. The conceit is pretty, and quite in the author's style ; but used as an argument, for which it is intended, it is not only sophistical it is damning to the person Tennyson. 15 that employs it. Let us accept the metaphor, and use it in this further inquiry : Who has grown Shaksperean flowers of poesy ? flowers such as Byron's, that he did not cultivate, but coaxed, like Spring, with a smile, or drew, like hot Summer, with the warmth of imperious passion, from the mountain side ? flowers such as Shelley has scattered broadcast through his pages ? flowers such as he himself speaks of in language whose very syllables distil the wild- honied poetry of no fabled Hymettus? flowers such as " Daisies, those pale arcturi of the earth, The constellated flower that never sets'* ? or such as " the tender harebell, at whose birth The sod scarce heaved"? Who has got the seed of these, and grown their duplicates ? Who has imitated any of these three ? No one, and for the simple reason that nobody can. Mr. Tennyson does well to speak of " his garden/' There it is ! His flowers of poesy are flowers of the garden a beautiful, exquisite, tasteful, sweet- smelling, brightly- glit- tering garden, but a garden. And gardens and 1 6 The "Poetry of the Period. all that they produce are essentially inritable. There may be only one Sir Joseph Paxton and only one Chatsworth, but their imitators run them hard. Similarly, Mr. Tennyson's may still .be the best as it was the first garden of its sort,, and he deserves, like Paxton and Chatsworth, the honour due and invariably rendered to pre- cursors. But it is of the very essence of truly great poetry that it can neither be invented, cultivated, nor copied. It grows of itself in a certain soil, and it will grow in no other, let metrical floriculturists labour as deftly as ever they will. It is an affair, not of grafting, crossing, fertilizing, or of ordinary reproduction at all, but of spontaneous generation, or what we call such in default of knowledge whence this strange, fitful, efflorescent foliage comes. The birds drop it, the winds bring it, the heavens rain it, the mist and the storm-clouds carry it about. It germinates in the rays of the sun, in the beams of the watery moon, in the secrecy and shroud of unfathomable darkness. It comes of the breath of God. Let there be light ! And, lo ! there is light and a poet ! It has nothing to do with gardens and garden seeds, trim par- terres, new variations, and watering-pots. There Tennyson. 1 7 lies the whole difference between great poets and poets that are not great between Mr. Tennyson and the Di Majores. And as there is a difference between them not only intensely of degree, but even of kind, so is there a difference in their doom. Garden poetry, besides being imi table, is variable, and subject to fashion, whim, caprice. Now Dutch gardening is in vogue, as it was when Pope* wrote. Now Italian gardening is all the rage, as it was when Cowper trimly moralized. Now English landscape-gardening ousts both, and Mr. Tennyson comes to the front. But Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, have nothing to do with gardens and gardening. Their concern is with the permanent aspects of Nature human nature included ; with the sea, the sky, the mountains, the far- stretching landscape, stormy winds that fulfil His Word, the planets, the intolerable thunder, grim murder, vaulting am- bition, mad revenge, earthquakes, and Prome- thean discontent. These are enduring. No fashion can change the waves and waters, no mode move the mountains, no alteration of taste * Pope, however, like Lucretius, has made his peace with posterity, and saved himself from all peril of oblivion, by writing a great ethical poem a possession for ever the " Essay on Man.' 2 1 8 The Poetry of the Period. obliterate the stars. These are always the self- same, and their years shall not fail. So are their singers. Where are the gardens of Sallust ? Where the fountains of Maecenas ? Where the terraces and laurelled walks of Hadrian ? " Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower grown Matted and massed together." These survive, and would still survive, even if the ruins on which they feed had been consumed. The Sabine hills are there, so are the Alban, so is the Campagna. You can kill neither the gods nor Nature, nor the inspired voices that are divinely commissioned to speak of them to their fellows. But mere man and his tricks and fancies, his little comedies and lesser tragedies ; his fashions, poses, and conceits; his Adelines, Madelines, and Enoch Ardens, well enough for their little day, necessarily pass away, and with them the gentle, elegant, but ephemeral creatures that have twittered about them on the particular guitar of the period. The more one considers this garden metaphor and all that it suggests, the more applicable it ever seems to be to Mr. Tennyson as a poet, and the more satisfactorily explanatory of his exact Tennyson. 19 poetical position, and its relation to that occupied by those with whom he has been so unwisely, and indeed sillily, compared. Let me quote a beautiful passage from the " Gardener's Daugh- ter," to my thinking the best of his Idylls : " Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love. News from the humming city comes to it In sound of funeral or of marriage bells ; And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear The windy clanging of the minster clock ; Although between it and the garden lies A league of grass, washed by a slow broad stream, That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar, Waves all its lazy lilies,* and creeps on, Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge Crown'd with the minster-towers. The fields between Are dewy- fresh, browsed by deep-uddered kine, And all about the large lime feathers low, The lime a summer home of murmurous wings."f You like that vastly ! It is one of your favourite passages ! So it is with me especially because it is so intensely Tennysonian, and marks in a definite manner his powers, his mission in a word, his sweep. I will illustrate and enlarge * A bit of plagiarism from Shelley, by the way. "t" Again, copied from Keats, and spoiled in the copying. 2Q The Poetry of the Period. on my meaning in a moment. But let me first ask, a propos of your admiring the above passage so warmly, in what sense it is you admire it, and to what extent ? You like it immensely ! But what do you think of it ? Do you seriously think it equal to, or worthy to be named in the same poetical breath with the thunderstorm in the Jura in " Childe Harold," the description of Waterloo, the long-sustained wail over the ' ' lone mother of dead Empires, the Niobe of Nations," the address, as of an equal, to the Ocean ? equal to or fit to be mentioned in the same poetical breath with the best-known quotations from " Lear," " Measure for Measure," " Henry the Fourth," " A Midsummer Night's Dream," or with the most glittering passages from tc Alastor," the f ' Lament for Adonais," the " Revolt of Islam," or the " Prometheus Unbound ?" Do you think that ? No, but you like it better ; it comes home to you more ; you care more for it ? Be it so. Perhaps, too, you prefer the canter of your mamma's steady nag to the long stride and tremendous bound of your father's thorough- bred ? But which, after all, is the better horse of the two ? We dare say you prefer Zephyrus to Eurus; but which is the stronger, grander Tennyson. 31 wind ? The first is smoother, softer, and more in harmony with your mood. That is quite con- ceivable. But what is your mood ? An amiable, elegant, refined one, truly and obviously. But an heroic one ? a sublime one ? a great one ? Scarcely. Yet it cannot be supposed that, because you are so constituted as to have a personal preference for the less, you do not know the difference between the iess and the greater, and mistake the one for the other. Like Mr. Tennyson, by all means; it would be the height of stupidity and intolerance to try to prevent your doing so. All that is asked is, that you should confess you think a great deal more of poets whom you care to read a good deal less. To refuse that much would imply only obstinacy or dullness, and place you among your favourite poet's "purblind race of miserable men," who " take true for false, or false for true." But quitting the ground of mere individual predilection, which, as we have seen, goes for ab- solutely nothing in a correct estimate of the rela- tive grandeur of poets, let us revert to our quota- tion, and scrutinize it as it illustrates what I have termed the C{ sweep " of its author. I have said that it is intensely Tennysonian. It is the poet 22 The Poetry of the Period. speaking not so much from his heart as from his whole nature : " Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love." What a mine of confession and suggestiveness there is in those two lines, when we come to consider and accurately measure the genius of their author ! From the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh, and his heart is partly in the city and partly in the fields. He is too much of a poet to be enamoured of Rotten Row or Piccadilly, or to be able to exclaim, " Give me the sunny side of Pall Mall;" but he is not enough of a poet, not exclusively such, so as to be able to exclaim : "'With me, High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture." It is a different lyre that strikes out that discontented note. Mr. Tennyson avows that he loves "news from the humming city," and does not like to get too far away from it. And when he does, where does he wish to find him- self ? Among the mountains ? Anywhere but there ! I do not remember a single earnest allusion to high mountains in the whole of his Tennyson. 23 poems. They are not with him a feeling. They are too much for him. If he confronted them, he feels instinctively they would silence him. Wordsworth, the sublime and holy, awed by them, yet competent, like Moses, to bring down from them to the vulgar world the lessons they command in fire of sunset or thunder of storm, fled to them as companions, not without sense of dread, but imperiously drawn to their tops by inspiration and worship : " The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite ; a feeling and a love That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye." Again, in the " Excursion," the same lofty voice smites our ears as with tidings from that land of " light that never was on sea or shore :" " The solid frame of earth And ocean's liquid mass in gladness lay Beneath him. Far and wide the clouds were touched, And in their silent faces could be read Unutterable love. Sound needed none, Nor any sense of joy." 24 The Poetry of the Period. No need of ' ' news from the humming city."" No need of " sound of funeral or of marriage bells ." No need of " the windy clanging of the minster clock :" " Sound needed none, Nor any sense of joy ; his spirit drank The spectacle : sensation, soul, and form All melted into him ; they swallowed up His animal being ; in them did he live, And by them did he live ; they were his life. In such access of mind, in such high hour Of visitation from the living God, Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired." I have preferred to quote from Wordsworth, because it would be a bold thing to insist, despite the unsurpassed sublimity of these passages, that he is, taken all in all, a poet of the very highest order, and because it never enters the vulgar mind to suppose that he is a far greater poet than Mr. Tennyson. I wish Mr. Moxon would tell us what proportion there is between his sale, during the last twenty-five years, of the works of the two men. The figures would show the estimation in which they are held, respec- tively, by the critical crowds of the age. But I defy Mr. Tennyson's admirers to quote anything from his works fit for one moment to be com- -Tennyson. 25 pared as sublime in other words, as great poetry with the lines just printed; and there are many more of them equally sublime in the two particular passages from which they are taken. The challenge is of course unanswerable, or can be answered only by Mr. Tennyson's preference for " A league of grass, washed by a slow broad stream, That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar, Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on, Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge Crown'd with the rainster-towers." "Who does not feel that we have dropped to a lower key from " sounding cataracts" to ' ' languid pulses of the oar" from storm-winds to zephyrs from thunder-fugues to " clanging clocks ?" I have nothing to say against it. It is exceedingly pretty, soothing, elegant; but it is not grand. It is the poetry of the drawing- room, not the music of the Spheres. Nor will it avail to plead that Wordsworth goes on to confess " That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. I have learned To look on Nature not as in the hour 26 The Poetry of the Period. Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes The still sad music of humanity." For the lines that follow show what was the real change that had come over him, enabling him oftentimes to hear this still sad music of humanity. No man is a great poet who does not hear it, and who confines himself to singing of Nature alone. It is the poet's loftiest mission to blend the two, but to blend them in so subtle a manner that the mystery of the one deepens the mystery of the other, and makes them almost interchangeable ; to produce, in fact, that " Sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused," of which Wordsworth speaks in the selfsame passage. Mr. Tennyson knows nothing of this. He writes " of funeral and of marriage bells," as novelists do, and he writes of "a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt," as poets of a certain order do ; but even these he does not contrive to commingle in such a way as to bring before us the everlasting puzzle of the sympathy, and yet conflict, of Humanity with Nature. Tennyson. 27 Drug thy memories, lest frhou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof, In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof," is his nearest approach, to it that I can recall; and this, though an exceedingly happy touch, has in it no element of real grandeur or sublime pathos. What is it compared to Byron's touch about Spring-coming, " With all her joyous birds upon the wing, I turned from all she brought to those she could not bring." Here we have Man, Nature, and the Perpetual Mystery face to face ; no shrinking on any side, and the poet giving adequate voice and ex- pression to all : " Not that I love Man less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From what I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can not express, yet cannot all conceal." It is in such passages as these that we are lifted up, just as we are in Shakespeare's mag- nificent lines : " To be embodied in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world:" 28 The Poetry of the Period. and are made to feel that even we, like the wizard hands that thus for a moment exalt us, are, as Shelley says, " made one with Nature." But what mighty pinions are required for such empyrean flights as these ! In one of Lacor- daire's most magnificent sermons, preached upon the text, " Go and convert all nations," he winds up an impassioned passage concerning apostolic zeal and the missionary spirit, by exclaiming, { ' Go across the mountains and the seas ! Go, but go straight ! Go, as the eagles go, and the angels !" Poets should, and great poets do, go in such a fashion. They go like the eagles ! They mount, ride on the storm, scale the ether, calm or disturbed, and stare at the sun. They go like the angels ! You cannot shut them out of heaven. You cannot exclude them from the deepest fathoms of the sea. For them, however it may be with kings, there is no " Thus far, and no farther" . . . . " I have loved thee, ocean .... I am, as it were, a child of thee .... I lay my hand upon thy mane .... Thou dost bound beneath me, as a steed that knows its rider." What splendid familiarity ! familiarity like that which enabled Shakespeare too to write : Tennyson. 29 " I have bedimm'd The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds, And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault Set roaring war : to the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak With his own bolt : the strong-bas'd promontory Have I made shake ; and by the spurs pluck'd up The pine and cedar By my so potent art." Ay, there it is ! " By my so potent art." If we could imagine Shakespeare, Byron, and even Wordsworth, meeting in the Elysian Fields, can we doubt that the " one touch of nature," common, as we have briefly shown, to all three, would make them kin, and force them to re- cognize each other as master-minds ? But Mr, Tennyson ! I fear Shakespeare would consider he had too much of the ' ' pouncet-box " about him. They would relegate him to "the garden that he loves," and regard him as one who, like his own " slow broad stream," is stirred only with languid pulses. His muse is dainty and delicious, but it is not daring and defiant. It is Pegasus, and Pegasus with four very decent legs, small, elegant head, right well groomed, and with an uncommonly good mane and tail ; but it is Pegasus without wings. It would be cruel to 30 The Poetry of the Period. apply to him Lacordaire's splendid image. Alas ! lie is no eagle. As I have said, he never soars. He twitters under our roof, sweeps and skims round and round our ponds, is musical in the branches of our trees, plumes himself on the edges of our fountains, builds himself a warm nest under our gables and even in our hearts, " cheeps," to use his own words, " twenty million loves," feeds out of our hand, eyes us askance, struts along our lawns, and flutters in and out among our flowery parterres does all, in fact, that welcome, semi- domesticated swallows, linnets, and musical bullfinches do; but there it ends. He is no " scorner of the ground/' He never leaves us to plunge among the far-off precipitous crags, to commune with embryonic tempests, to travel with the planets, and then swoop down divinely laden with messages hard yet not alto- gether impossible to understand. We love him, because he is ours. We love him, because, like the garden he himself loves, he is "not wholly in the busy world, nor quite beyond it." In other words, he thinks with us of this particular day, feels with us of this day, and is the exponent of such poetical feelings as in this day we are capable of. But as far Tennyson. 31 as poetry is concerned we and our day are not great, but little, and he shares our little- ness with us. It is not our fault, some may perhaps think it is not even our misfortune, that such greatness as the present age achieves, or can achieve, does not lie in the poetical, but in a wholly opposite direction. The age is scientific or it is nothing. Now science and all its pro- cesses, its aims and its methods alike, are antago- nistic to poetry, and its aims and methods. The scope of science, as far as literature is concerned, is demonstration, and its machinery must be strict reasoning of some sort. The scope of poetry is the embodiment of emotion, and its vehicle and means must be of an unreasoning, and sometimes even of an unreasonable character. Greater contrast, indeed more absolute conflict, could not well be imagined. Mr. Tennyson has been the complete sport of this conflict; with what results anybody who is well acquainted with his works and has this key to guide him may soon perceive for himself. He is alternately the poet pure and simple, singing true songs, sweet or sad, as it happens ; or the poet crossed by the man of scientific thought and intelligence, trying to weld together two things that are essentially 32 The Poetry of the Period. antagonistic, and producing a species of metrical emulsion that people with only poetical instincts feel not to be poetry, and people with only scien- tific insight know not to be science, but which people with lingering poetical tastes and grow- ing scientific proclivities combined would like to make serve both for poetry and science. Men with a strong poetical turn of mind, but with not so decided and obstinate a bias for being poets as Mr. Tennyson, give up the struggle, consciously or unconsciously, and become like Professor Tyndall or Mr. Disraeli philosophers or poli- ticians. Men, on the contrary, with the same turn, but with a still more decided, obstinate, and exclusive poetical nature and temperament than Mr. Tennyson, squander their lives in trying to attain the impossible, exhaust themselves in poetical spasms, and illustrate Alexander Smith's simile : " Poesy ! thou art a rock ; I, a weak wave, would break on thee, and die." I could name one or two living men who have achieved considerable notoriety by their volumes of verse, whom it would be easy to imagine being, in an age more favourable to the achieve- ment, poets of the very highest order. I feel Tennyson. 33 sure that Mr. Tennyson could never have been that in any age, and probably never in any age a greater poet than he has proved himself in this. Yet, to the impartial mind, there can be no doubt- that, as far as work done goes, the one or two men to whom I allude are very much his inferiors. And it is no paradox to say that their natural superiority to him is the very cause of their inferiority. Success, and even merit, as far as we can' judge it, is the composite result of the agent ahd his conditions ; and if the larger and grander agent be more out of harmony with the conditions under which he works than the smaller agent, it is not only possible, but almost certain, that the latter will produce more valuable work. To put an extreme but conclusive case. If Shakespeare had been living now, would he have been as great a poet as Mr. Tennyson is ? I entertain little doubt that he would not, and I have serious doubt whether he would have been known as a poet at all worth speaking of. A pigmy can live and breathe in a place and atmo- sphere in which a giant could not move for want of room, or speak for want of air. Let us reverse the case. If Mr. Tennyson had been born in the Elizabethan era, should we ever have 3 The Poetry of the Period. heard of him ? Perhaps ; but at most as the author of some courtly masques. The truth is, the present age, taken in the lump, likes Mr. Tennyson's poetry, as any, and every age, has liked its particular poet, because he speaks its mind for it far more efficiently than anybody else. Consequently it likes and enjoys him better than Scott, better than Shelley, better than Byron, better than Milton, and whatever it may now and then pretend to the contrary, out of sham and conventional deference it likes and enjoys him better than Shakespeare. It reads him more, and gets more satisfaction out of reading him. But, as I said before, liking and enjoyment of a poet are no test of that poet's greatness. There are men of sound intellect and sense who infinitely prefer Horace to Homer, and women of exquisite sentiment who infinitely prefer Mrs. Hemans to Mrs. Barrett Browning. It so happens, however, that the serious critic can put himself outside folks' various likings and preferences. He is not bound by the average tastes of his time. All literature is open to him, and he approaches the measurement of any new poetical claimant with the standard left by the productions of bygone centuries. He does not Tennyson. 35 ask men to give up their newly-found idol, the cherished poetical god of their narrow domestic hearth; but he does and must insist that they shall not mistake him for a celestial, and most of all that they shall not thoughtlessly or presump- tuously call him Jove. If they do, he must produce his god-measurer, and reduce their little divinity to his true proportions. It is natural enough that the age, having got in Mr. Tennyson a poet that it vastly likes, should want to persuade itself that he is a great poet. Self-love impels it to nourish the delusion. No- body will deny that ours is a particularly vain- glorious age ; and, being such, it would be painful to it to confess that it has not produced a first-rate specimen of what it has hitherto been the universal creed to believe the highest mental type of humanity viz., a really great poet. How do we note the past ages ? ' We speak of the age of Homer, the age of Dante, the age of Shakespeare. Can anybody in his senses ima- gine posterity speaking of our age as the age of Tennyson? Posterity will be too kind to do anything so sardonic. It will speak of it as the age of Railways, the age of Destructive Criticism, or the age of Penny Papers. In some way or 36 The Poetry of the Period. other it will try to distinguish us. But the age of Tennyson ! The notion is, of course, prepos- terous. If, then, this age of ours does not wish to cease to pride itself upon its achievements, and cannot make up its mind to lay aside its vaingloriousness, let it strive to persuade itself that great poetry is by no means the best and highest outcome of human genius. Let it turn round and assert that the Submarine Telegraph is grander than "Lear," the Pneumatic Dis- patch grander than " Comus/' Great Exhibitions grander than the " Tragedies of JEschylus," and the halfpenny " Echo" a greater triumph for man than the fourth canto of " Childe Harold." It is an intelligible position ; I do not say it is an indefensible one, though I confess I would rather not have to defend it. But, at any rate, let it either do that, and justify its vaingloriousness and conceit of superiority over all its predecessors by pointing to something in which it has un- questionably and immeasurably surpassed them, or let it stick to the old doctrine that a great poet is the crown and summit of an age's glory, and meekly confess that, though it has done its best, it has failed to produce one. But let it not make itself a laughing-stock to an irreverent posterity Tennyson. 37 by piquing itself on what it has not got. We laugh at the contemporaries of Hayley. Do we want to be laughed at by our grandchildren? Mr. Tennyson is much more of a poet than Hayley, no doubt; but then Hayley was never belauded as Mr. Tennyson is by us. There is yet time to revise and recall our hasty and extra- vagant praises; and Mr. Tennyson's merits are so obvious and so considerable that, when we have plucked off all the false feathers in which we have bedecked hmx, some very beautiful plumage will remain. But our attempts to glorify our- selves by over- exalting him can do no possible good to anybody; and if we persist in this ridiculous course, it will only ensure our being scoffed at by less partial times as a parcel of indiscriminating dunces. [HE soundness of an opinion may usually be tested by the amount of delibera- tion with which it is adopted, plus the tenacity with which, when so formed, it is adhered to. Men often arrive at conclusions with amazing haste, and maintain them with proportionate obstinacy ; whilst others, who reach them after long consideration, abandon them almost as soon as they have been embraced. It is obvious that no reliance can be placed on views attended in either case with circumstances of so much suspicion. There exists a strong presumption of their validity only when they have been cautiously formed, and are consistently upheld. The opinion which has prevailed during the last twelve years or so as to Mr. Tennyson's Browning. 39 merits, does not satisfy one, at least, of these conditions. I will not stop to inquire how it came about that he was ever spoken of, by people who aspire to be authorities in such matters, as a great poet.* It is more to our present purpose to note the fact that even now, whilst he still lives, and his adulators are natu- rally averse from stultifying themselves by re- canting the more fulsome praises they have so often and so confidently lavished on him, our Poet Laureate is beginning to totter on his throne. The signs of mutiny against his long unchallenged supremacy are unmistakable. I have already expressed the opinion that, as far * Simultaneously with the appearance of the foregoing paper on Mr. Tennyson in the " Temple Bar" magazine, appeared an article in the " Quarterly Review " on " Modern Poets," in which much the same view, though more guardedly worded, was taken of that gentleman's poetical position as is developed in my essay. Indeed there is a striking similarity between some of the illustrations employed in them to illustrate the fundamental difference between exquisite poetry and great poetry. I can therefore have no quarrel with the Quarterly Reviewer on that score. But I am lost in wonder at a writer, who has evidently some breadth of judgment and some insight into the subject, quoting the following lines (from Mr. Hugh Arthur Clough, deceased, whom certain pedants have been striving for the last seven or eight years to induce the British public to accept as a bard, and, indeed, a bard of no small magnitude) as poetry, and observing that he doubts " if a more perfect description 40 The Poetry of the Period. as work done is concerned, lie is unquestionably at the head of living English poets. But in the quarters whence first issued, and where was long stoutly maintained, the preposterous theory that he is a really great poet, voices scarcely am- biguous proceed, intimating not only that there is perhaps some doubt upon that point, but that in any case one greater than he has long been dwelling amongst us. For let there be no mis- take about it. The same coteries, and in many cases the very same people, who by dint of per- of the surroundings of a waterfall can be found anywhere." Here it is : " But in the interval here the boiling pent-up water Frees itself by a final descent, attaining a basin Ten feet wide and eighteen feet long, with whiteness and fury Occupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror ; Beautiful there for the colour derived from green rocks under ; Beautiful, most of all, where beads of foam uprising Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of its stillness, Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendent birch boughs ; Here it lies unthought of above at the bridge and the pathway, Still more enclosed from below by wood and rocky projection." Now I take leave to say that this is not poetry at all ; and, further, that if it had appeared in a three volume novel in prose and it might easily be printed in a prose guise without a reader suspecting it to be anything else it would never have occurred to any human being to make a remark about it, unless it were to observe that it is rather jerky. Browning. 41 sistence imposed upon the unreflecting crowd the exaggerated estimate of Mr. Tennyson against which I have protested, are now striving to induce them to abandon their idol and set up another. Where they have long put Mr. Tenny- son, they now want to place Mr. Browning. I propose to. deal with the reasons which can be adduced in support of this new opinion; but, before entering on the task, I wish to point out what this change of opinion, whether it be sound or unsound, really signifies. It signifies that, whether Mr. Browning be our great living poet or not, Mr. Tennyson is confessedly ceasing to be esteemed such by the very persons who so noisily exalted him into that false position. Their defection, therefore, is fatal to him, for men never desert a true divinity when they have once found him. They change their idols, not their gods; and the metamorphosis of regard which we are now witnessing, however it bears on the fetish newly adopted, is conclusive against the fetish newly cast aside. It is not I alone who doubt if Mr. Tennyson be a great poet. His quondam flatterers do the same. I deny it explicitly. They deny it implicitly. That is the whole difference a difference I am quite content 42 The Poetry of the Period. to leave in that condition. What they now assert is that Mr. Browning is our great modern seer. To this, the most astounding and ludicrous pretension ever put forward in literature, let us "betake ourselves. In the year 1835, Mr. Browning, whose name at least is now sufficiently notorious, but who both then and for many years afterwards was utterly unknown to fame, wrote "Paracelsus." There was a fine opening for a poet. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Scott, were gone ; and Wordsworth, besides being sixty-five years of age, and therefore superannuated as far as the faculty of imagination is concerned, abstained from publication. Two little volumes of verse had appeared, one in 1830, another in 1832 ; and the latter, containing " The Miller's Daughter," " New Year's Eve/' " Lady Clara Yere de Vere," and ' ' The Dream of Fair Women," had attracted a certain amount of attention. People spoke of their author as a poet, and justly; but it had not yet occurred to anybody to associate either his name or his work with greatness. They were waiting for the appearance of a star of larger magnitude before using up that valuable epithet. It certainly did not strike them that the author Browning . 43 of ' ' Paracelsus " was that star ; and it would have been strange if it had. Indeed " Para- celsus " did not strike them at all. It was not a poem, whatever the writer meant it for, and the public did not mistake it for a poem. A com- position in verse, however, is virtually nothing if it be not a poem ; and accordingly " Paracelsus" was treated as an absolute nullity. But it was something, for all that. I do not mean to say that the public was not right in taking no notice of it. The public was quite right, and is quite right in taking no real notice of it still, though it is duly paraded in Mr. Browning's collected f( Poetical Works." The absurdity lies with those who, ignoring it altogether at the time of its first appearance, would fain treat it, more than thirty years after that event, as overlooked poetry. Still, as I say, it was something, and was deserving of notice by those necessarily, and desirably, a few who are interested in mental peculiarities and psychical phenomena. " Paracelsus," whatever its faults, was full of thought; not poetical thought, but thought of its kind. Its thoughts were not altogether, if at all new, at least to anybody acquainted with the writings of Saint Simon and his disciples; but 44 The Poetry of the Period. they were new to verse, and the individual who propounded them in that form, despite much obscurity of thought and expression, evidently possessed no ordinary powers of language. I will make but one brief quotation, which is amply sufficient for my purpose, whilst at the same time it gives a fair idea of the best passage in the whole work : " Progress is The law of life ; man's self is not yet Man ! Nor shall I deem his object served, his end Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth, While only here and there a star dispels The darkness, here and there a towering mind O'erlooks its prostrate fellows : when the host Is out at once to the despair of night, When all mankind alike is perfected, Equal in full-blown powers then, not till then, I say begins man's general infancy !" No unreflecting or uncultivated mind could write that even now ; much less could an unreflecting or uncultivated mind have written it in 1835. With the exception of the figure about a host of stars being out " to the despair of night" which is, poetically speaking, abominably bad there is nothing in the passage with any pretension to be poetical at all. But it is instinct with philo- sophical forecast (whether true or false is at Browning. 45 present foreign to my purpose). Indeed Mr. Browning has always been well to the front in the prevailing tone of thought; and here he is strikingly distinguished from Mr. Tennyson, who is, so to speak, half-way in it and in its middle ranks. Some years later we find Mr. Tennyson introducing the selfsame views into his com- positions ; but by that time numbers of thoughtful Englishmen had also embraced them. But greatly as Mr. Tennyson is the inferior of Mr. Browning in catching early glimpses of philo- sophic truth, or what for a time is supposed to be such, he is immeasurably his superior in assimilating them into poetry. Mr. Browning not having a poetical organization, but rather a philosophical one, cannot, in his assumed role of poet, assimilate into verse these fresh scientific theories. All that his mechanical Muse can do with them is to churn and muddle them, and the result is that we should infinitely prefer to have them from Mr. Browning as Mr. Browning him- self first received them in prose. And here we arrive at a most important observation. It is often said that no person can speak a language well until he can think in it. The remark is still more applicable to poetry. A 46 The Poetry of the Period. man, to write poetry, must think in poetry. Thinking in prose, and then turning that prose thought into metre, will not do. Verse, no doubt and perhaps very good verse will be the result, but not poetry; at the very best only a plausible simulation of it. That Mr. Tennyson often, if indeed not usually, thinks in poetry what he writes in verse, 'nobody can doubt. The thought comes to him poetically, and he renders it poetically. Now, Mr. Browning rarely, if ever, thinks in poetry. His thoughts are often tre- mendously deep thoughts deeper than any Mr. Tennyson is ever visited by ; but they reach him in the guise of prose, and, so reaching him, quit him in substantially the same form, though draped on their reappearance in the disguise of verse. Let me very briefly illustrate my meaning. Southey, as is well known, kept a Commonplace Book in which he habitually jotted down various thoughts and observations, some of which he intended later, when he had time, to turn into what he thought poetry, but what most people are now agreed is nothing of the kind. Words- worth also kept tablets, in his brain at least, with the same object. The result is and as my esti- mate of his poetical powers is so high and has Browning. 47 already been so strongly expressed, I have the less hesitation in saying it that fully one-half of what Wordsworth too has written, is hardly anything more than verse. But when he is not referring to his mental tablets, but is yielding to the urgent passion of the moment, how he rises into true unmistakable poetry ! Unintentionally, no doubt for he thereby utterly upsets his own theorising on the subject elsewhere he lets us see in some of his most poetical passages the very process by which they were arrived at : " A herdsman on the lonely mountain tops, Such intercourse was his, and in this sort Was his existence oftentimes possessed." Mark the significance of that word " pos- sessed/ ' He goes on to describe how the herds- man "in the mountains did. feel his faith;" how he lay " on the green turf in pensive idleness ;" how " Nature was at his heart as if he felt, Though yet he knew not how, a wasting power In all things which from her sweet influence Might tend to wean him." He speaks of his being "overpowered by Nature/' and " the first virgin passion of a soul 48 The Poetry of the Period. communing with the glorious universe/' If the reader will refer to the quotations I made from Wordsworth in the essay on Mr. Tennyson, he will be again struck with the same thing : " In such access of mind, in such high hour Of visitation from the living God, Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired." He goes, you see, so far as to say that " thought was not/' He was not thinking at all j certainly he was not referring to his tablets or jotting down fresh memoranda. He was being visited by the living God. God was thinking for him, pouring divine thoughts through him ; him who had as all great poets, and great poets only, have channels ready-made for the reception and transmission of such precious messages. Turn we now again to Mr. Browning, whom I have been bearing well in mind during what may perhaps have seemed a digression, but what has the closest relevancy to his case. Whether Mr. Browning keeps a Commonplace Book, we have no means of knowing ; but we have every means of knowing that he thinks in prose, for the prose thoughts are there before us, gratuitously turned by some arbitrary whim, which I confess Browning. 49 completely puzzles me, into metre. Mr. Browning is, as I have said, a profound thinker, and nearly all his thoughts have the quality of depth. Now, probably all thoughts to which this quality of depth can be ascribed, arrive at the portals of the brain in prose their natural vesture ; whilst, on the contrary, lofty thoughts, their antitheses, usually enter it in the subtle garb of music. Here we have a clear difference in kind j prose thoughts, so to speak, from below poetical thoughts, so to speak, from above. If we suppose a permeable plane dividing these two regions of thought, we can easily understand how there comes to be what we may call a sliding scale of poets, and a sliding scale of philosophical thinkers; some of the latter, to whom the faculty of philo- sophising cannot be denied, being rather shallow some of the former, whose claims to poetical status cannot fairly be questioned, not being very soaring ; and we can further understand how the natural denizens of one sphere may ever and anon cross the permeable plane, invade the other sphere, and seem to belong to it in the sense in which foreigners belong to a country they are constantly visiting. But for all that there ever remains a substantial difference between the two 50 The Poetry of the Period. spheres and between their respective native in- habitants, between the country of poetry and the country of prose, between poetical power and instinct and philosophical power and proclivity. Accordingly, where a man talks the language of the sphere to which he properly belongs in other words, when the philosophical thinker pub- lishes his thoughts in prose, or a poetical thinker addresses us in verse our task is comparatively simple. All we have got to do is to decide whether the former be profound or shallow, and whether the latter have a lofty or a lagging pinion. It is when a man affects to talk the language of the sphere to which he does not essentially belong, that he deceives some people, and puzzles us all. This is precisely what Mr. Browning has done. Hence most people scarcely know what to make of this poetico-philosophical hybrid, this claimant to the great inheritance of bardic fame, whose hands are the hands of Esau, but whose voice is the voice of Jacob. Several, whose eyes, like those of Isaac, are dim, and who therefore cannot see, admit the claim hesi- tatingly, it is true, again like Isaac of the hands, and accept him as a poet. But it is the true resonant voice, not the made-up delusive hand, Browning. which is the test of the singer ; and to those whose sight is not dim, Mr. Browning is not a poet at all save in the sense that all cultivated men and women of sensitive feelings are poets but a deep thinker, a profound philosopher, a keen analyser, and a biting wit. With this key to what to most persons is a riddle for, despite the importunate attempts of certain critics who, as I have already said, having placed Mr. Tennyson on a poetical pedestal considerably too high for him, are now beginning to waver in. their extravagant creed, and are disposed to put him on one a trifle lower, placing Mr. Browning there instead, the general public has not yet become quite reconciled to the operation I think I shall be able to rid them of their perplexities. At any rate, I will keep applying it as we go along. Let us revert to " Paracelsus," and take our start from it, as Mr. Browning himself did. His lyrical pieces apart of which something anon and the humouristic faculty which has since developed itself in him, Mr. Browning in ' ' Para- eel sus," is what Mr. Browning is in all the many so-called poetical works he has since given to the world. He is Mr. Browning, naturally not yet The Poetry of the Period. grown to his full size ; not yet quite so deep, shrewd, obscure, fantastical, unmusical ; but with the exceptions we have just made, what manner, and matter of mental man he is may there be satisfactorily scrutinized. He is at his never- abandoned natural task of thinking deep thoughts in prose, and his artificial trick of turning them into verse. He is, as he imagines, working like a dramatist, just as he has since imagined himself to be working as a dramatist in such pieces as " Bishop Blougram's Apology/' " Caliban on Setebos," etc. Indeed, he has let us into the secret of his method in " Bordello," written very shortly after " Paracelsus," in the following lines ; which I quote, though at the risk perhaps of most of my readers declaring that they have not the faintest notion as to what they mean : " How I rose, And how you have advanced ! since evermore Yourselves effect what I was fain before Effect, what I supplied yourselves suggest, What I leave bare yourselves can now invest. How we attain to talk as brothers talk, In half-words, call things by half-names, no balk From discontinuing old aids. To-day Takes in account the work of Testerday : Has not the world a Past now, its adept Browning. 53 New aids ? A single touch more may enhance, A touch less turn to insignificance, Those structures' symmetry the Past has strewed The world with, once so bare. Leave the mere rude Explicit details ! 'tis bat brother's speech We need, speech where an accent's change gives each The other's soul no speech to understand By former audience : need was then to expand, Expatiate hardly were we brothers ! true Nor I lament my small remove from you, Nor reconstruct what stands already. Ends Accomplished turn to means : my art intends New structure from the ancient." It must not be supposed that I quote this passage with approbation. Not only do I think it not poetry, but I think it detestable gibberish, even if I look at it as prose. Had Mr. Browning been writing bond fide prose, he would have put it very differently and much more intelligibly j but talking, to revert to our metaphor, in a foreign language over which, he has not obtained due mastery, he is shockingly unintelligible, or at least painfully difficult to understand. By dint of great trouble I have arrived at under- standing the above passage, and will endeavour briefly to explain its meaning. The reader has no doubt heard the vulgar proverb, " A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse." Mr. Browning 54 The Poetry of the Period. wishes to intimate that a nod or a wink is really and seriously as good to an intelligent man of the nineteenth century as formal speech. Shakespeare, and such unfortunate individuals, having had to deal with an inferior set of people, were compelled to use "rude explicit details." Mr. Browning's ef art intending new structure from the ancient/' has only to "talk in half- words, call things by half-names/-' and if they do not understand him, the fault is theirs of course, not his. They are not his brothers. In this same " Sordello," from which I am quoting, over each page stands a prose heading, which is a continuation of the foregoing one. Over the passage from which I have made the above extract, the following headings occur : " He asserts the poet's rank and right, Basing these on their proper ground, Eecognizing true dignity in service, Whether successively that of Epoist, Dramatist, or, so to call him, analyst, Who turns in due course synthesist." Now the last two headings are of great im- portance, just as is the passage in verse below them which I have quoted, because, however false may be their matter, and however deplor- able their manner, they contain Mr. Browning's Browning. 55 own estimate of his office, and his own account of his method. As such, they are invaluable to us. Just one more brief confession on his part will complete for us the idea, as understood by himself, of his functions as a poet. In the Dedication of c ' Sordello " to Mr. Milsand, written in 1863,, or twenty- three years after it was first published, Mr. Browning writes : " The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires j and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul : little else is worth study. I, at least, always thought so." Thus Mr. Browning's office, according to his own account, is that of an analyst who tarns in due course synthesist and developes a soul by half-words ; or, as I should put it, it is to get inside an imaginary or his- torical personage, and evolve him for the benefit of the intelligent public by nods and winks. This is how his " new art intends new structure from the ancient." I hope my readers understand me ; for, if they do not, they will certainly never understand Mr. Browning, and it is highly desirable that they should understand so much of him as the foregoing, both in order to be able to measure 56 The Poetry of the Period. him as lie asks to be measured, and to appreciate this account of him, which a very little reflection will show to be in perfect harmony with, and in- deed substantially the same as, his own account of himself. What is his own account of himself ? An analyst who turns in due course synth'esist, whose subject matter is souls, and whose method of communication with the outer world is half- words arranged in metre. "What is my account of him ? A subtle, profound, conscious psycho- logist, who scientifically gets inside souls, and, having scrutinized their thoughts and motives in a prose and methodical fashion, then makes them give the result, as if they had been scrutinizing themselves, in verse. This latter operation Mr. Browning evidently imagines is synthesis. There never was a more ludicrous mistake. It is, in reality, nothing more than the analysis completed and stated, and is no more synthesis than a lecture by Professor Huxley on the vertebrata is an animal. Mr. Browning labours under the greatest possible delusion when he imagines that he ever ' ' turns in due course synthesist." That is precisely what he never does. He remains a mere analyst to the end of the chapter, pottering about among the brains and entrails of the souls Browning. 57 lie has dissected, and utterly unable to do any- thing with them, except to call attention to the component parts he has skilfully laid bare with his knife. It would be wonderful if he could do anything more ; just as wonderful as it would be if the anatomical professor could put together again the poor carcass of the dog he has reduced to so many inanimate members. He can galvanise them, it is true, for a moment, into simulating life. So can Mr. Browning. But that is the range of the synthesis of both of them. If Mr. Browning wants to know of a dramatist who is a real synthesist, I can easily tell him of one. His name is Shakespeare. But, then, Shakespeare was, luckily, not so great in analysis as Mr. Browning. Speaking properly, Shakespeare never analyses at all in our presence, and pro- bably never did so even in the presence of his own consciousness, any more than millions of men, who speak grammatically, analyse the con- struction of their sentences before they utter them. Every real drama indeed every real work of plastic (as opposed to mere technic) art is an organism, a growth, a vitality, just as much as is a bird, a tree, or a mammal. Not only is it true that a poet is born, not made, but 58 The Poetry of the Period. it is equally true that his poem is born,, not made.* In his brain, heart, soul, whatever we like to call it in his being would be, perhaps, the best word exists the seed or germ of a poem or of many poems ; and all that external conditions, sights, sounds, experiences, can do for this seed or germ is to foster or to check it. But the thing itself, the real living, poetic pro- toplasm, is not to be had or got ab extra. Going about seizing upon objects and submitting them to analysis, even though synthesis be then super- added, will by no means produce poetry, or any work of plastic art using the word art properly, as opposed to craft. Otherwise a chemist, who finds out what a particular kind of gunpowder is made of, and then makes it, would be a poet. For to him is peculiarly applicable Mr. Brown- in g's definition of " dramatist }t terrible drama- tist indeed !