CHAPTER XXVI. TENNYSON AND THE VICTORIAN POETS. § 1. The transitional period: THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES. § 2. THOMAS HOOD and WINTHROP MACKWORTH PRAED. $ 3. ALFRED TENNYSON: early poetry. § 4. From 1842 to the Idylls. § 5. The Idylls and later poems. Summary. § 6. ROBERT BROWNING: poetry till 1846. § 7. Married life. The great monologues. The Ring and the Book. $8. After The Ring and the Book. Summary. § 9. MRS. BROWNING. § 10. MATTHEW ARNOLD: poetry of youth and manhood. § 11. His prose. General features of his work. § 12. The Pre-Raffaellite movement: D. G. ROSSETTI. § 13. WILLIAM MORRIS and The Earthly Paradise. § 14. CHRISTINA ROSSETTI. $ 15. ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH and the younger LORD LYTTON. § 16. General remarks. THOMAS § 1. THE most interesting personality among the poets who conduct us from the great romantic age to the age of Tennyson, was the eccentric and rather obscure THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES, a nephew, through his mother, LOVELL of Miss Edgeworth. His father had a large practice BEDDOES as a doctor in Clifton, and he himself, after a youth (1803-1849). spent at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Oxford, went abroad to study medicine. For the remainder of his life he stayed on the Continent, living in a very eccentric manner and producing a small quantity of poetry. There is very little doubt that, in the later years of his life, his sanity left him. The truth about his death will never be known, but its circumstances point to suicide. It is only to be expected that the work of so peculiar a man should wear a morbid complexion; and his unfinished medley, Death's Fest-Book, or the Fool's Tragedy (1850)-his earlier work is scanty and unimportant-is ghastly in subject and treatment. Beddoes, born in the midst of the romantic revival, was one of those people whose genius seems to take its colour from the air round them and to owe a debt to no concrete influence. The Elizabethan spirit of tragedy was natural to him, and the study of such sombre poets as Tourneur, who probably attracted him most, brought out his latent and kindred capacity. Death's Fest-Book, considered as a drama, is neither great nor pleasant, but it has merit far above the ordinary, which is easily discovered by comparing it with the Sir John Woodvil of so devout and instinctive an Elizabethan as Charles Lamb. The point, however, in which Beddoes stands pre-eminent among his contemporaries, is his use of the lyric. His work is studded with occasional songs which, with an Elizabethan purity and ease of style, have also a peculiar and haunting charm, like music heard in sleep. This gives his work a distinction which could hardly rest on a merely tragic foundation; moreover, in these songs we see the brighter, if still morbid, side of an art which is otherwise more unique than delightful. Had he written more, Beddoes probably would have succeeded in disappointing his admirers; as it is, the scantiness of his poetry serves to stimulate our curiosity. HOOD § 2. THOMAS HOOD, unfortunately driven to make merry for a public which did not appreciate his better work, has the usual reputation of a purely comic writer. His father was THOMAS a bookseller in the Poultry and, dying early, left his son to make his own living. After some time in a merchant's office and as an engraver's apprentice, Hood turned to journalism and, becoming assistant sub-editor of The London Magazine, associated himself with the "Cockney" school-Lamb, Hazlitt, etc. The Odes and Addresses (1825), written in collaboration with his friend Reynolds, and the Whims and Oddities (1826-7) earned for him a success with the general public which his serious poetry could never have secured. He at once became a popular writer; but in the midst of his success a firm failed and involved him in its losses. He did not seek the aid of the bankruptcy court; but, emulating Scott's example, determined to pay off the debt which he had involuntarily contracted. To do this he went to Germany, where he could live economically, and took up his abode at Coblenz in 1835. In 1837 he removed to Ostend, and returned to London in 1840. A year later he obtained the editorship of The New Monthly Magazine, which he kept till the end of 1843. 1844 was the birth-year of Hood's Monthly. A pension was procured for him, with reversion to his wife and daughter, in 1844; but he died of consumption in the spring of the following year. Hood wrote charmingly, and his delicate fancy, which excelled in songs and pretty little lyrics, gives him a very conspicuous place among poets of the second class. Hood's char- Nor can anyone read even his confessedly comic acteristics. work without seeing its pathetic side. Hood was a humorist of Charles Lamb's type, on whom personal sorrow left its mark, easily understood of every reader. He had a keen, almost sentimental, appreciation of natural beauty, which found its expression in many places of his work. Closely akin to this was his distinctive love of human nature, which endowed the English language with many poems showing the deepest sympathy with human life and character. The principal pieces of this kind, the famous Bridge of Sighs or The Song of the Shirt, although they are a little too sentimental and declamatory to please the more fastidious order of readers, have, by their forcible appeal to pathos, obtained an immense popularity and are universally known. At first sight it is a little difficult to recognise these energetic poems of philanthropy as the fruits of a pen which also wrote the Comic Annual and Miss Kilmansegg ; and, in his more tender and lyric moods, in which he rose at his best to that Elizabethan delicacy so obvious in the work of his friends and comrades, the identity is even harder to detect. But his own saying that "there's not a string attuned to mirth but has its chord in melancholy" goes far to explain the apparent discrepancy between his serious and comic work. As regards his sense of the odd and ridiculous, Hood was unsurpassed in his age. His puns are the great exception which proves the rule that this type of wit is execrable. At the same time he could write caustic satire without a shadow of coarseness or unnecessary suggestion in it. On the more pathetic side of his humour, we have said, he was apt to become sentimental and even a little intolerable; such poems as The Deathbed and I remember are of a melancholy which, in other hands, might be suspected as insincere, and is here carried much too far. And it is a relief to turn from these to the strenuous appeal of The Bridge of Sighs or the sound balladmusic of Eugene Aram. To look for Hood's finer and more ethereal work we must go to his more sustained and elaborate pieces, The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies or Lycus the Centaur. Hood's everyday poems show us the manysidedness of his humour. These pieces, with their richness of natural description, are the highest indication of what he could do as a poet. W. M. PRAED Hood's chief contemporary in humorous writing was WINTHROP MACKWORTH PRAED, three years his junior. Praed came of good family. His father, Serjeant Praed, was a distinguished member of the bar. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, showing an early talent for facetious writing. He was called to the bar, entered Parliament, and died at the early age of thirty-seven, while he was Secretary to the Board of Control. During his busy life he had cultivated his unusual genius for composing vers de société, and we may safely say that in this peculiar style he has no dangerous competitor. To compare his humour with Hood's is a vain task-the environment of both poets was so entirely different. Praed, in happy circumstances, could easily adopt the light tone of persiflage which he brought to its finest perfection. Such pieces as the Letter of Advice and a few others-Praed was not always so good-are little chefs-d'œuvre. On the other hand, the well-known Red Fisherman belongs to a different side of his humour, and shows the presence of a grotesque and imaginative faculty which is not always given to writers of polished society verse. § 3. Meanwhile, six years after Praed, the great poet of the later ALFRED nineteenth century had been born. ALFRED TENNYSON was the son of a Lincolnshire clergyman at Somersby, in the southern part of the Wolds. He was born on August 6, 1809, at his father's parsonage house, and the first nineteen years of his life were passed exclusively in his native county, at Somersby itself, and at Louth grammar school. The scenery of the Wolds had a life-long effect on his verse, and its influence on his early poems is very perceptible; while in later life he wrote several pieces in the dialect which he might have heard the farmers talking at Spilsby or Horncastle market. His liking for verse was obvious from his early childhood. Two of his elder brothers, Charles-whose entire life was passed in Lincolnshire-and Frederick, were also drawn towards poetry, and in their riper years produced minor verse not unworthy of their name. In 1827 Charles and Alfred found that they had written enough verse to fill a modest volume. As, like the authors of Lyrical Ballads a generation earlier, they were in want of a little money to cover the expenses of a projected tour, they sought, aided by their coachman's suggestions, to barter their verse for it. A Louth bookseller, with an optimism almost worthy of Cottle, gave them £20 for the copyright, and published the volume under the title of Poems by Two Brothers. The little book had nothing epochmaking about it, but the verse was respectable and contained the first blossoms of a poetical genius that, sixty-five years after, had not ceased to bear fruit. Which of the one hundred and two pieces thus published were written by Charles, or which were written by Alfred, is a matter of the merest guess-work, as the boys agreed never to tell. Neither reprinted a single one of these poems; only an occasional thought, image, or expression, was rescued by Alfred to reappear, more or less altered, in his later verse. at Cambridge. по In 1828 the brothers went to Trinity College, Cambridge. The ordinary routine of University life seems to have attracted Tennyson as little as any other great poet; he did Tennyson not linger about Cambridge as Wordsworth had done, but went down summarily without taking his degree. But, if lectures and examinations played no part in the development of his genius, Cambridge itself impressed him with its gray flats" and gardens and college chapels; and, in some of the finest stanzas of In Memoriam, he paid a vivid tribute to the place. More important than this was the influence of the society into which he was thrown. Shy, diffident, and sensitive, disliking the general habits of his contemporaries, he fortunately became the member of an intellectual set whose ideas and aspirations were far beyond those of most young men. As a member of the "Apostles" Club-an informal society of men who met in each other's rooms--he became the friend of Trench, Milnes, and Spedding, and more especially of Arthur Henry Hallam, two years younger than himself. Tennyson was liked by all and loved by several; but his intimacy with Hallam was the most important event of his early life, and, thanks to his deathless verse, is one of the memorable friendships of all time. He read his own poems to his friends, doubtless controlling all he wrote by his sense of their keen intelligence and fastidious taste; they, on their side, recognised his genius and gave it generous praise. In 1829 his blank-verse poem on Timbuctoo gained him the Chancellor's Medal; it was the admiration of his circle at Cambridge, and was hailed by an enthusiastic notice in The Athenæum. Better though it is than most prize-poems, there is nothing in it definitely Tennysonian. His peculiar and His first poems (1830). individual accent, the mark and test of his work, did not come to him at once. Encouraged by the success of Timbuctoo, he proceeded to bring out (1830) his first separate volume of verse. Even in the fifty-three Poems, chiefly Lyrical, of which he subsequently retained about half for his permanent work, his accent is fitful; and, although pieces like Mariana in the Moated Grange, The Dying Swan, and Oriana, are full of promise and suggestion, while they have the signs of true poetry, the whole book is eloquent of a genius still feeling its way amid the pitfalls of immaturity. One obvious feature in the work of this new poet struck his critics. Its harmony, its colour, its vivid appreciation of beauty, its minute natural observation, no less than its failings, were all due to the "Cockney" school, and especially to Keats. Although the elements in Tennyson's poetry were various, its foundation rested upon Keats and partook of his qualities, good and bad. The Quarterly and Blackwood, which had been obstacles in Keats' way, attacked the young poet before long out of sheer opposition to his belated cockneyism, Lockhart in the one and Wilson in the other. Tennyson, upon his father's death in 1831, left Cambridge and resolved to make poetry the business of his life. At the end of 1832 he published a second volume of Poems by Alfred Tennyson, which began with The Lady of Shalott and contained Enone, The Lotos-Eaters, Mariana in the South, A Dream of Fair Women, and other famous pieces. The improvement was tremendous, but the faults were there and were mercilessly picked out by the critics. Tennyson was too sensitive to face the world with another volume. He at once countermanded The Lover's Tale-which had been written at Cambridge five years before-just as it had begun to issue from the press. It was not published until 1879, ten years after its sequel, The Golden Supper. It was in 1833 that Tennyson thus retired. Before the end of the year the sorrow that was long to darken his life had befallen him. In September, Arthur, Hallam, the friend whose spirit had been one with his, died suddenly at Vienna. For ten years the only verses of Tennyson which the world saw were a few short and unwilling contributions to Annuals. |