Ch. 3 - The Great Victorian Poets
1439 Words
What was really unsatisfactory in Victorian literature is something much
easier to feel than to state. It was not so much a superiority in the
men of other ages to the Victorian men. It was a superiority of
Victorian men to themselves. The individual was unequal. Perhaps that is
why the society became unequal: I cannot say. They were lame giants; the
strongest of them walked on one leg a little shorter than the other. A
great man in any age must be a common man, and also an uncommon man.
Those that are only uncommon men are perverts and sowers of pestilence.
But somehow the great Victorian man was more and less than this. He was
at once a giant and a dwarf. When he has been sweeping the sky in
circles infinitely great, he suddenly shrivels into something
indescribably small. There is a moment when Carlyle turns suddenly from
a high creative mystic to a common Calvinist. There are moments when
George Eliot turns from a prophetess into a governess. There are also
moments when Ruskin turns into a governess, without even the excuse of
sex. But in all these cases the alteration comes as a thing quite abrupt
and unreasonable. We do not feel this acute angle anywhere in Homer or
in Virgil or in Chaucer or in Shakespeare or in Dryden; such things as
they knew they knew. It is no disgrace to Homer that he had not
discovered Britain; or to Virgil that he had not discovered America; or
to Chaucer that he had not discovered the solar system; or to Dryden
that he had not discovered the steam-engine. But we do most frequently
feel, with the Victorians, that the very vastness of the number of
things they know illustrates the abrupt abyss of the things they do not
know. We feel, in a sort of way, that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Carlyle when he asks the Irish why they do not bestir themselves and
re-forest their country: saying not a word about the soaking up of every
sort of profit by the landlords which made that and every other Irish
improvement impossible. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Ruskin when he says, with a solemn visage, that building in iron is ugly
and unreal, but that the weightiest objection is that there is no
mention of it in the Bible; we feel as if he had just said he could find
no hair-brushes in Habakkuk. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man
like Thackeray when he proposes that people should be forcibly prevented
from being nuns, merely because he has no fixed intention of becoming a
nun himself. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like Tennyson,
when he talks of the French revolutions, the huge crusades that had
recreated the whole of his civilisation, as being "no graver than a
schoolboy's barring out." We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Browning to make spluttering and spiteful puns about the names Newman,
Wiseman, and Manning. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Newman when he confesses that for some time he felt as if he couldn't
come in to the Catholic Church, because of that dreadful Mr. Daniel
O'Connell, who had the vulgarity to fight for his own country. We feel
that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like Dickens, when he makes a blind
brute and savage out of a man like St. Dunstan; it sounds as if it were
not Dickens talking but Dombey. We feel it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Swinburne, when he has a Jingo fit and calls the Boer children in the
concentration camps "Whelps of treacherous dams whom none save we have
spared to starve and slay": we feel that Swinburne, for the first time,
really has become an immoral and indecent writer. All this is a certain
odd provincialism peculiar to the English in that great century: they
were in a kind of pocket; they appealed to too narrow a public opinion;
I am certain that no French or German men of the same genius made such
remarks. Renan was the enemy of the Catholic Church; but who can imagine
Renan writing of it as Kingsley or Dickens did? Taine was the enemy of
the French Revolution; but who can imagine Taine talking about it as
Tennyson or Newman talked? Even Matthew Arnold, though he saw this peril
and prided himself on escaping it, did not altogether escape it. There
must be (to use an Irishism) something shallow in the depths of any man
who talks about the _Zeitgeist_ as if it were a living thing.
But this defect is very specially the key to the case of the two great
Victorian poets, Tennyson and Browning; the two spirited or beautiful
tunes, so to speak, to which the other events marched or danced. It was
especially so of Tennyson, for a reason which raises some of the most
real problems about his poetry. Tennyson, of course, owed a great deal
to Virgil. There is no question of plagiarism here; a debt to Virgil is
like a debt to Nature. But Tennyson was a provincial Virgil. In such
passages as that about the schoolboy's barring out he might be called a
suburban Virgil. I mean that he tried to have the universal balance of
all the ideas at which the great Roman had aimed: but he hadn't got hold
of all the ideas to balance. Hence his work was not a balance of truths,
like the universe. It was a balance of whims; like the British
Constitution. It is intensely typical of Tennyson's philosophical temper
that he was almost the only Poet Laureate who was not ludicrous. It is
not absurd to think of Tennyson as tuning his harp in praise of Queen
Victoria: that is, it is not absurd in the same sense as Chaucer's harp
hallowed by dedication to Richard II or Wordsworth's harp hallowed by
dedication to George IV is absurd. Richard's court could not properly
appreciate either Chaucer's daisies or his "devotion." George IV would
not have gone pottering about Helvellyn in search of purity and the
simple annals of the poor. But Tennyson did sincerely believe in the
Victorian compromise; and sincerity is never undignified. He really did
hold a great many of the same views as Queen Victoria, though he was
gifted with a more fortunate literary style. If Dickens is Cobbett's
democracy stirring in its grave, Tennyson is the exquisitely ornamental
extinguisher on the flame of the first revolutionary poets. England has
settled down; England has become Victorian. The compromise was
interesting, it was national and for a long time it was successful:
there is still a great deal to be said for it. But it was as freakish
and unphilosophic, as arbitrary and untranslatable, as a beggar's
patched coat or a child's secret language. Now it is here that Browning
had a certain odd advantage over Tennyson; which has, perhaps, somewhat
exaggerated his intellectual superiority to him. Browning's eccentric
style was more suitable to the poetry of a nation of eccentrics; of
people for the time being removed far from the centre of intellectual
interests. The hearty and pleasant task of expressing one's intense
dislike of something one doesn't understand is much more poetically
achieved by saying, in a general way "Grrr--you swine!" than it is by
laboured lines such as "the red fool-fury of the Seine." We all feel
that there is more of the man in Browning here; more of Dr. Johnson or
Cobbett. Browning is the Englishman taking himself wilfully, following
his nose like a bull-dog, going by his own likes and dislikes. We cannot
help feeling that Tennyson is the Englishman taking himself
seriously--an awful sight. One's memory flutters unhappily over a
certain letter about the Papal Guards written by Sir Willoughby
Patterne. It is here chiefly that Tennyson suffers by that very
Virgilian loveliness and dignity of diction which he put to the service
of such a small and anomalous national scheme. Virgil had the best news
to tell as well as the best words to tell it in. His world might be
sad; but it was the largest world one could live in before the coming of
Christianity. If he told the Romans to spare the vanquished and to war
down the mighty, at least he was more or less well informed about who
_were_ mighty and who _were_ vanquished. But when Tennyson wrote verses
like--
- Writer
