From Chaucer to Tennyson
hint from a paragraph in Swift's _Tale of a Tub_: "A sect was
established who held the universe to be a large suit of clothes....If
certain ermines or furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a
judge; and so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a
bishop." In _Sartor Resartus_ Carlyle let himself go. It was willful,
uncouth, amorphous, titanic. There was something monstrous in the
combination--the hot heart of the Scot married to the transcendental
dream of Germany. It was not English, said the reviewers; it was not
sense; it was disfigured by obscurity and "mysticism." Nevertheless even
the thin-witted and the dry-witted had to acknowledge the powerful
beauty of many chapters and passages, rich with humor, eloquence,
poetry, deep-hearted tenderness, or passionate scorn.
Carlyle was a voracious reader, and the plunder of whole literatures is
strewn over his pages. He flung about the resources of the language with
a giant's strength, and made new words at every turn. The concreteness
and the swarming fertility of his mind are evidenced by his enormous
vocabulary, computed greatly to exceed Shakspere's, or any other single
writer's in the English tongue. His style lacks the crowning grace of
simplicity and repose. It astonishes, but it also fatigues.
Carlyle's influence has consisted more in his attitude than in any
special truth which he has preached. It has been the influence of a
moralist, of a practical rather than a speculative philosopher. "The end
of man," he wrote, "is an action, not a thought." He has not been able
to persuade the time that it is going wrong, but his criticisms have
been wholesomely corrective of its self-conceit. In a democratic age he
has insisted upon the undemocratic virtues of obedience, silence, and
reverence. _Ehrfurcht_, reverence--the text of his address to the
students of Edinburgh University in 1866--is the last word of his
philosophy.
In 1830 Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), a young graduate of Cambridge,
published a thin duodecimo of 154 pages entitled _Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical_. The pieces in this little volume, such as the _Sleeping
Beauty, Ode to Memory_, and _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_, were
full of color, fragrance, melody; but they had a dream-like character,
and were without definite theme, resembling an artist's studies, or
exercises in music--a few touches of the brush, a few sweet chords, but
no _aria_. A number of them--_Claribel, Lilian, Adeline, Isabel,
Mariana, Madeline_--were sketches of women; not character portraits,
like Browning's _Men and Women_, but impressions of temperament, of
delicately differentiated types of feminine beauty. In _Mariana_,
expanded from a hint of the forsaken maid in Shakspere's _Measure for
Measure_, "Mariana at the moated grange," the poet showed an art then
peculiar, but since grown familiar, of heightening the central feeling
by landscape accessories. The level waste, the stagnant sluices, the
neglected garden, the wind in the single poplar, re-enforce, by their
monotonous sympathy, the loneliness, the hopeless waiting and weariness
of life in the one human figure of the poem. In _Mariana_, the _Ode to
Memory_, and the _Dying Swan_, it was the fens of Cambridge and of his
native Lincolnshire that furnished Tennyson's scenery.
Stretched wide and wild, the waste enormous marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,
The trenched waters run from sky to sky.
A second collection, published in 1833, exhibited a greater scope and
variety, but was still in his earlier manner. The studies of feminine
types were continued in _Margaret, Fatima, Eleanore, Mariana in the
South_, and _A Dream of Fair Women_, suggested by Chaucer's _Legend of
Good Women_. In the _Lady of Shalott_ the poet first touched the
Arthurian legends. The subject is the same as that of _Elaine_, in the
_Idylls of the King_, but the treatment is shadowy, and even
allegorical. In _OEnone_ and the _Lotus Eaters_ he handled Homeric
subjects, but in a romantic fashion which contrasts markedly with the
style of his later pieces, _Ulysses_ and _Tithonus._ These last have the
true classic severity, and are among the noblest specimens of weighty
and sonorous blank verse in modern poetry. In general, Tennyson's art is
unclassical. It is rich, ornate, composite; not statuesque so much as
picturesque. He is a great painter, and the critics complain that in
passages calling for movement and action--a battle, a tournament, or the
like--his figures stand still as in a tableau; and they contrast such
passages unfavorably with scenes of the same kind in Scott, and with
Browning's spirited ballad, _How we brought the Good News from Ghent to
Aix_. In the _Palace of Art_ these elaborate pictorial effects were
combined with allegory; in the _Lotus Eaters_, with that expressive
treatment of landscape noted in _Mariana_; the lotus land, "in which it
seemed always afternoon," reflecting and promoting the enchanted
indolence of the heroes. Two of the pieces in this 1833 volume, the _May
Queen_ and the _Miller's Daughter_, were Tennyson's first poems of the
affections, and as ballads of simple rustic life they anticipated his
more perfect idyls in blank verse, such as _Dora_, the _Brook, Edwin
Morris_, and the _Gardener's Daughter._ The songs in the _Miller's
Daughter_ had a more spontaneous lyrical movement than any thing he had
yet published, and foretokened the lovely songs which interlude the
divisions of the _Princess_, the famous _Bugle Song_, the no-less famous
_Cradle Song_, and the rest. In 1833 Tennyson's friend, Arthur Hallam,
died, and the effect of this great sorrow upon the poet was to deepen
and strengthen the character of his genius. It turned his mind in upon
itself, and set it brooding over questions which his poetry had so far
left untouched; the meaning of life and death, the uses of adversity,
the future of the race, the immortality of the soul, and the dealings of
God with mankind.
Thou madest Death: and, lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.
His elegy on Hallam, _In Memoriam_, was not published till 1850. He
kept it by him all those years, adding section after section, gathering
up into it whatever reflections crystallized about its central theme. It
is his most intellectual and most individual work; a great song of
sorrow and consolation. In 1842 he published a third collection of
poems, among which were _Locksley Hall_, displaying a new strength, of
passion; _Ulysses_, suggested by a passage in Dante: pieces of a
speculative cast, like the _Two Voices_ and the _Vision of Sin_; the
song _Break, Break, Break_, which preluded _In Memoriam_; and, lastly,
some additional gropings toward the subject of the Arthurian romance,
such as _Sir Galahad, Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere_, and _Morte d'
Arthur._ The last was in blank verse, and, as afterward incorporated in
the _Passing of Arthur_, forms one of the best passages in the _Idylls
of the King_. The _Princess, a Medley_, published in 1849, represents
the eclectic character of Tennyson's art; a mediaeval tale with an
admixture of modern sentiment, and with the very modern problem of
woman's sphere for its theme. The first four _Idylls of the King_, 1859,
with those since added, constitute, when taken together, an epic poem on
the old story of King Arthur. Tennyson went to Malory's _Morte Darthur_
for his material, but the outline of the first idyl, _Enid_, was taken
from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the Welsh _Mabinogion_. In
the idyl of _Guinevere_ Tennyson's genius reached its high-water mark.
The interview between Arthur and his fallen queen is marked by a moral
sublimity and a tragic intensity which move the soul as nobly as any
scene in modern literature. Here, at least, the art is pure and not
"decorated;" the effect is produced by the simplest means, and all is
just, natural, and grand. _Maud_--a love novel in verse--published in
1855, and considerably enlarged in 1856, had great sweetness and beauty,
particularly in its lyrical portions, but it was uneven in execution,
imperfect in design, and marred by lapses into mawkishness and excess
in language. Since 1860 Tennyson has added little of permanent value to
his work. His dramatic experiments, like _Queen Mary_, are not, on the
whole, successful, though it would be unjust to deny dramatic power to
the poet who has written, upon one hand, _Guinevere_ and the _Passing of
Arthur_, and upon the other the homely dialectic monologue of the
_Northern Farmer_.
When we tire of Tennyson's smooth perfection, of an art that is over
exquisite, and a beauty that is well-nigh too beautiful, and crave a
rougher touch, and a meaning that will not yield itself too readily, we
turn to the thorny pages of his great contemporary, Robert Browning
(1812-1889). Dr. Holmes says that Tennyson is white meat and Browning is
dark meat. A masculine taste, it is inferred, is shown in a preference
for the gamier flavor. Browning makes us think; his poems are puzzles,
and furnish business for "Browning Societies." There are no Tennyson
societies, because Tennyson is his own interpreter. Intellect in a poet
may display itself quite as properly in the construction of his poem as
in its content; we value a building for its architecture, and not
entirely for the amount of timber in it. Browning's thought never wears
so thin as Tennyson's sometimes does in his latest verse, where the
trick of his style goes on of itself with nothing behind it. Tennyson,
at his worst, is weak. Browning, when not at his best, is hoarse.
Hoarseness, in itself, is no sign of strength. In Browning, however, the
failure is in art, not in thought.
He chooses his subjects from abnormal character types, such as are
presented, for example, in _Caliban upon Setebos_, the _Grammarian's
Funeral, My Last Duchess_ and _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_. These are all
psychological studies, in which the poet gets into the inner
consciousness of a monster, a pedant, a criminal, and a quack, and gives
their point of view. They are dramatic soliloquies; but the poet's
self-identification with each of his creations, in turn, remains
incomplete. His curious, analytic observation, his way of looking at
the soul from outside, gives a doubleness to the monologues in his
_Dramatic Lyrics_, 1845, _Men and Women_, 1855, _Dramatis Personae_,
1864, and other collections of the kind. The words are the words of
Caliban or Mr. Sludge; but the voice is the voice of Robert Browning.
His first complete poem, _Paracelsus_, 1835, aimed to give the true
inwardness of the career of the famous 16th century doctor, whose name
became a synonym with charlatan. His second, _Sordello_, 1840, traced
the struggles of an Italian poet who lived before Dante, and could not
reconcile his life with his art. _Paracelsus_ was hard, but _Sordello_
was incomprehensible. Browning has denied that he was ever perversely
crabbed or obscure. Every great artist must be allowed to say things in
his own way, and obscurity has its artistic uses, as the Gothic builders
knew. But there are two kinds of obscurity in literature. One is
inseparable from the subtlety and difficulty of the thought or the
compression and pregnant indirectness of the phrase. Instances of this
occur in the clear deeps of Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe. The other
comes from a vice of style, a willfully enigmatic and unnatural way of
expressing thought. Both kinds of obscurity exist in Browning. He was a
deep and subtle thinker, but he was also a very eccentric writer;
abrupt, harsh, disjointed. It has been well said that the reader of
Browning learns a new dialect. But one need not grudge the labor that is