John Drinkwater

“ To complain that Tennyson overestimated the power of words to give up some remote, and as it were almost independent, life of their own to the poet’s incantation, is to complain that he presumed to look upon language as in itself a source of poetic life, which was no very wild thing for a poet to do, since life, like God, does move in a mysterious way. ”

“ Every now and again some one raises a false issue as between journalism and literature, suggesting that literature is arrogant in looking upon journalism as being less exalted than itself. It is the same kind of silly baiting as is sometimes indulged in between actors and dramatists, when it is indignantly suggested that it is an affront to the admirable art of Burbage to hold that it is, if the comparison must be made, on a lower creative plane than that of Shakespeare. ”

“ But in the light of achievement we may not unprofitably consider what are the conditions that have governed that achievement from age to age, and so perhaps at least correct some of the false and easy notions that we are apt to foster about the art of our own time, when we approach it unset in its right historical perspective. Tennyson and Browning and Arnold and the Rossettis and Morris and Swinburne give us the delight of experience perfectly expressed, and that is the first, and in a way the last, thing to be said about them as poets. ”

“ But in love the individual’s authority is as great as any common authority can be, since love itself, as apart from thought about love, is the same in its essential nature, whatever measure of that nature may be given, to one man as to another, and so there is gain when that thought about love, as distinguished from love itself, is allowed the utmost freedom; and in this freedom the Victorian age in poetry is more personal than any that had preceded it. ”

“ To read the work of the almost forgotten smaller men of that time is to chance often upon a phrase in which the tenderness, and heart-ache, and the warm sense of colour and natural beauty, which were so to dominate the great epoch from Wordsworth to Keats, break through the witty and balanced argument of an age when it was not considered to be the thing to say too much about the heart. ”

“ Shakespeare gives us life, moulded to a temperament, it is true, but untrammelled by any other control, while Milton gives us life, still moulded to a temperament, but also beyond that tested in some measure by a morality that is intellectually fixed, and in seeking to justify the ways of God—God being only another word for that morality—Milton inevitably fails to justify humanity as Shakespeare so triumphantly does. ”

“ Alice Meynell, on the other hand, with her diction so chaste and disciplined and exact, her imagery so frugal and unadorned, is a rarefied incarnation of the grave magic that the genius of Matthew Arnold had caught from the seventeenth century, a century which in so far as it worked upon Thompson did so rather in its florid ecstasy. ”

“ It is precisely the poet’s business to translate such words as these into poetry, to recreate the things that they stand for in the looseness of common talk and not to take them over with all their imperfections on them. In conversation, even in written prose, they have their place and are well enough, but in poetry they won’t do—though most poets have blundered in this matter at one time or another. It is not a case of forbidding the poet simple and commonplace words; these he may use as often as he will, if he can use them with mastery. ”

“ No more of this need be said here, but the list of Victorian plays written by men of great poetic gifts is a pathetic witness of the indomitable aspirations of the English genius towards drama and of the shameless indifference through long periods of the theatre towards those aspirations. What these men might have done in a fortunate theatre cannot be said, but in view of the very imperfect evidence available it would be quite unsafe to say of any one of them that he had not the gifts that would have served a great theatre greatly. ”

“ I have not in general much use for criticism that quotes other criticism, but at this time of day any one may steal from the stores of Professor Saintsbury’s learning and wisdom, and although there is no modern critic, perhaps, so provocative as he, there is none who has left his mark so indelibly upon every subsequent judgment of English poetry. ”

“ No formula can ever be invented that shall include the social conscience and romantic tenderness of Maud, [227] Browning’s passionate but ruthless psychological subtlety, Rossetti’s entranced voluptuousness, the proud surrender of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, Patmore’s transfigured worldliness and Swinburne’s enraptured embodiment of an abstract passion in a substantial image. In Victorian love poetry there is no dominant figure but that of love itself, but the theme is celebrated with an orchestral fullness that had never before been attained. ”

“ Poetry will never take kindly to free verse as a common method, though any poet is likely to practise it at intervals. So-called polyphonic prose, which is only a variety of free verse, may lend itself often to admirable writing when it happens to be used by an admirable writer, but for most of us it is incapable of the peculiar delight given by regular verse forms which have been evolved through centuries of experience. The introduction of classical metres into English poetry is a lost cause, as it always has been, attractive though it may be to a fine spirit now and again. ”

“ Men like Clough, Dixon, and de Tabley were fine spirits finely touched to song. Clough, to speculate idly, with a little more energy, might have found his way into the great group of his age. Dixon was a lyric poet who has been eulogised by so fastidious a critic as Mr. Bridges, which is warrant enough for any man. And de Tabley constantly got to the summits, only to find them too slippery for long foothold. But, individual as these and the others were in their gifts, the extracts given are enough to show clearly how susceptible the poetry of the age was to Tennyson’s diction. ”

“ If we consider love poetry as a whole we shall find but an extremely small part of it is concerned with the fundamental ecstasy of love itself, with the adoration of the lover for the beloved in terms of ordinary experience and not modified by special circumstance as it was, for example, with Dante, and when it is so concerned it necessarily changes hardly at all except in verbal idiom from age to age. Love poetry, for the most part, is concerned not with love itself but with the lover’s attitude towards and contemplation of his love, in fact, not with love so much as with thought about love. ”

“ To-day it is not supposed to be good form to speak about a man being a gentleman at all, and democracy no longer encourages us to think about a man being a gentleman at all. We are all now (at least we all may be) nature’s gentlemen, and much may be said for the doctrine. Tennyson was part of a society where the aristocratic distinction was not merely a reality in fact, but one acknowledged intellectually, and the more we see of the world the less certain can we be that any one stage in social development is demonstrably better than another. ”

“ It is not like that of Keats, such as he uses in many passages of The Eve of St. Agnes, where the inspiration is an almost swooning delight in tropical colours and spiced odours and textures very mellow to the touch. Keats aimed at and succeeded marvellously in finding in words some equivalence for these sensations, but with Tennyson the artistic intention was to arrest some almost impalpable property in the words themselves. When we [90] charge a poet with merely using words we can only mean that he is using impoverished words. ”

“ Again, as a last example, Sir William Watson in his Autumn has, within a few lines of each other—
At thy mute signal, leaf by golden leaf,
Crumbles the gorgeous year.... and
And passage and departure all thy theme
Whose life doth still a splendid dying seem,
And thou, at height of thy magnificence,
A figment and a dream.... the one of which is nebulous and the other shaped. And the language has many pairs or groups of words, not necessarily synonymous but of a like character, that fall respectively into the “gorgeous” or “magnificent” class, as, for instance, valorous, heroic ”

“ If we go further and say that in a work such as King Lear we get the two natures perfectly combined in one organism, we are still talking without wilful obscurity, and we are explaining in a rough and ready way, and yet in a way that is, perhaps, as good as any other, why it is that a work like King Lear shows poetry in its highest and most comprehensive exercise. ”

“ When Tennyson first published his poetry—or the more significant part of his juvenile poetry—there would be little to impress itself as remarkable originality of style, and this was as it should be. It is only the eccentric in art that arrests garrulous attention, an attention that has no memory. ”

“ There is no telling at any time where exactly you are going to catch the true turn of racy or imaginative idiom, and it is as unsafe to generalize in favour of the rustic as it is to do so in favour of the tutored townsman. Good minds make good speech, and cumulatively they give the common diction of an age a character which cannot escape the poets when poetry has any health in it, which, to do it justice in looking back over five hundred years of achievement, is nearly always. ”

“ It is true that no good poet has ever worked without some example in his mind, but the Elizabethans were conscious of an Italian influence as of something vivid and present among them, a very part of their own lives, as it were, whereas the Elizabethan influence upon Keats was something deliberately remembered, something won back from a long past age. Without in the least detracting from the achievement of Keats, which must remain among the greatest in English poetry, it may be said that in this respect the Elizabethans were Italians but that Keats imitated the Elizabethans. ”

“ The worldly pilgrims of Chaucer’s book, Elizabeth’s intrepid adventures, the saintly learning and gestured gallantry that fought it out in Puritan England, have in turn passed from the centre of the stage of articulate national life, to make way for the man about town, the philanderer, the coquette, and the sententious moralist. The innuendo and the moral precept are together on every man’s lips, not wholly insincere in their partnership. And the idiom of this witty, argumentative, intriguing and [42] rather self-righteous society is perfectly turned to the use of genius in the Popean poetry. ”

“ No one is likely to read the Morte d’Arthur or the Garden of Proserpine or the Scholar Gipsy or Pippa Passes with any more poetic delight for anything that he may find in this essay, but here and there a friendly mind may get a little pleasure of a real though less essential kind in considering for a moment, apart from the fundamental things of poetry that persist from one generation to another, what were the characteristics that distinguished an age, of which these are representative creations, from the other ages with which it has now taken an equal and immortal place. ”

“ We have only to take any characteristic passage from one of the supreme creators of rhythmical life, such as Shakespeare and Milton and [138] Wordsworth and Keats and Tennyson and Arnold, and to see how nervously the phrasing line runs through it, to realise how little of this line there is in Swinburne, and that the beat which rings so seductively or impressively in our ears from The Garden of Proserpine and The Forsaken Garden and the Atalanta choruses and a hundred other splendid poems, is really a metrical beat and not a rhythmical beat at all. ”

“ So pronounced is this that the absence of rhythmical vitality does not matter, being made good by a metrical beauty that under this poet’s direction is in itself something as satisfying. And the poverty of the diction is no longer poverty, taking from the metrical genius of the verse all that it needs of colour and temperament. Swinburne’s characteristic contribution to the poetic technique of his age was to show that great verse could be produced without the greatest gifts of rhythm or diction. ”

“ But if we are content with a mood so unvexed by argument, a thought so incapable of obscurity, we shall be well rewarded. For this very fixity of emotional purpose, [79] to be confused perhaps by an unsympathetic judgment with an empty self-sufficiency, achieves its own purity of poetic style with, for us, its accompanying delight. It is just because Tennyson is so singly intent upon the elementary content matter of his poetry that he has no need of care to avoid assuming other men’s emotions, or, more precisely, their emotional accent. ”

“ In other words, the moral judgment becomes inevitably a part of life itself, and is an altogether profounder thing than a merely abstract moral point of view. And this, indeed, is one of the chief glories of Shakespeare’s art, as of the whole poetry of his age, that it is intensely concerned with life, with its moral consequences, but it is hardly at all concerned with [194] moral points of view that are not directly the consequence of life as it grows at the poet’s bidding. ”

“ Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and a few individual lyrics by other men, are so well known to every reader of poetry that it is difficult to say how readily we could distinguish them without their familiarity, but beyond these it is safe to say of the great body of Elizabethan love lyric, with all its superb singing quality and varied command of imagery, that we could never with any certainty tell one poet from another by the nature of his attitude towards his subject. ”

“ I could not deem myself a slave. Even Shelley, or that mood in him that was preoccupied with the fiery pinnacles in the clouds, kept the diction of his most ethereal flights in tune with the same instinctive necessity. ”

“ It is true that many aspects of the age’s genius would then be recorded in something a little short of their finest manifestation, though others could hardly ask for more authoritative witness. But in no one poet are the several aspects assembled at so representative a level of expression. The pressure of Patmore’s individual poetic energy was not so great as that of Tennyson or Browning, hardly as that of Morris or Arnold or Swinburne. ”

“ But in the Ode, written clearly upon an occasion by which Tennyson was deeply moved, and one rich in associations that were of peculiar appeal to his genius, he cannot keep his style wholly free of editorial influence. This is not to speak in disparagement of a poem to which on the whole the term magnificent is not misapplied, and one of the supreme successes of its kind. But to acknowledge this is not to concede that the whole of the splendid eulogy of “the statesman-warrior, moderate, resolute” is couched in terms of pure poetry. ”

“ The picture of Tennyson as a “poet of the file,” forever labouring in a lapidarian discontent, is, perhaps, one that has been overdrawn, but hardly any creative faculty of the first rank in poetry has ever been so pervaded by the mood of the artificer. Nothing could be wider of the truth than to argue that the poise and balance and perfect dovetailing that mark all his best versification [87] are merely so much decoration, a kind of seductive jugglery that used up good energy that might have been better employed. ”