Tennyson & Browning

 Tennyson as a representative poet of Victorian England.

- The fame of Tennyson, now a little dimmed and tarnished by the breath of Time, occupied this epoch with a great and immediate brilliance. He is unquestionably the representative English poet of his time. He mirrors its ordinary cultivated mind as it shaped in the English temperament and intelligence, with an extraordinary fidelity and in a richly furnished and heavily decorated mirror set round with all the art and device that could be appreciated by the contemporary taste. There has been no more consummate master of the language, and this mastery is used with a careful, sure and unfailing hand. Whatever has to be expressed, whether it be of considerable, mediocre or no worth, is yet given a greater than its intrinsic value by a power of speech which without any such remarkable or astonishing energy as would excite or exalt the mind or disturb it from a safe acquiescence and a

- luxurious ease of reception, has always a sufficient felicity, curiously worked even when it affects simplicity, but with a chastened if not quite chaste curiosity. The turn of phrase almost always hits the mind with a certain, sometimes easy, sometimes elaborate poetic device. It turns always to find and does find the pictorial value of the thing to be described, and even, if such a phrase can be used, the pictorial value of the thought to be seized. There is a similar happiness of device and effect in the verse; if there are no great lyrical, odic or epic outbursts to sweep us out of ourselves, there is the same well-governed craft of effective turn and invention as in the language, the same peculiar manner of easily carried elaborateness, a leisurely but never sluggish self-considering self-adorning flow which succeeds in being immediately received and accepted. The art with which the subject matter is dressed up is of the same kind; a restrained elaborateness, a curious picturesqueness of presentation, a taking, sometimes opulent and effective form. The refinement and felicity are not of a kind which call for any unusual receptive power or aesthetic fineness to meet it and feel all its beauty; there is enough and to spare to attract the cultured, nothing to baffle or exceed the ordinary mind. This art is that of a master craftsman, a goldsmith, silversmith, jeweller of speech and substance with much of the decorative painter in his turn, who never travels beyond general, well-understood and popular ideas and forms, but gives them by his fineness of manner and felicity of image a charm and distinction which belong more properly

- to rarer and greater or lovelier motives. The achievement is of a kind which would hardly be worth doing more than once, but done that once and with such mastery it takes its place and compels admiration. The spirit is not filled and satisfied, much less uplifted, but the outer aesthetic mind is caught and for a time held captive.

* The limitations of his substance and vision

- But it is doubtful whether the future will attach to Tennyson's poetry anything at all near to the value it assumed for the contemporary English mind. When we try to estimate the substance and see what it permanently gives or what new thing it discovers for the poetic vision, we find that there is extraordinarily little in the end. Tennyson wrote much narrative poetry, but he is not a great narrative poet. There is a curious blending of incompatible intentions in all his work of this kind and even his exceptional skill could not save him from a brilliant

- He has on the one side a will to convey some high spiritual and ethical intention of life through the imaginative use of tale and legend, and that could give a scope for a very noble kind of poetry, but he has not the power to lay a great hold on the ancient figures and recreate them to be symbols of a new significance. The Idylls of the King miss both the romantic and the idyllic beauty and arrive only at a graceful decorated effective triviality. The grand old Celtic myths and traditions already strangely

mediaevalised by Malory, but full still of life and large humanity and colour are modernised into a baffling and disappointing superficiality and miss all greatness and power of life. There is no congruity between the form and symbol and the feeling and substance. They seem solely to be used to frame a conventional sentimentalism of Victorian domesticity and respectable social ethics. But the wearing of the white and scentless flower of a blameless life in a correct button-hole and a tepid sinning without the least tinge of passion or conviction by decorated puppets who are too

- The poet has no meditative, no emotional or impassioned, no close or revealing grasp on life, and on the other hand no deep interpretative idea, and without one or other of these things narrative poetry of the modern kind cannot succeed; it becomes a body without soul or life-breath. Even when Tennyson confines himself to the poetic modern tale without these disguises or any motive but the ethically pointed telling, he arrives at the same result, a richly coloured triviality.

* His lack of depth and originality in thought; His representativeness of the Victorian mentality

- This principal work of his maturity fails; its popularity springs from its work of detail and its appeal to the superficial sentiment of the time: but some earlier work of the kind had a nobler success. In the Morte d'Arthur there is some natural magic and vision which if it had been sustained and kept the same delicate and mystic strain, might have made the cycle of idylls a new poetic revelation. In other poems, in the Lotos-Eaters, Ulysses, Oenone, where set narrative

- avoided and the legend is a starting-point or support for thought, vision and beauty, some fullness of these things is reached; but still the form is greater than the substance which has no heights and only occasionally strikes depths. Tennyson does not figure largely as a lyrical poet in spite of one or two inspired and happy moments; for he has neither the lyrical passion and intoxication nor the profounder depth of lyrical feeling. In his description of Nature there is no greater seeing, but a painting of vivid details detached for simile and ornament, and though he worked up a great accuracy of observation and colour, the deeper sincerity of the born Nature-poets is absent. Finally he gives us a good deal of thinking of a kind in often admirably telling phrase and with much art of setting, but he is not a revealing poetical thinker. His thought seldom escapes from the conventional limits of a cultivated, but not a large or original Victorian mind; it beautifies most often the obvious and commonplace or the current and acceptable ideas; with rare exceptions he has neither exaltations nor profundities nor subtleties nor surprises. A great poetical craftsman turning many forms to account for the displaying of an unusual power of descriptive and decorative language and a verse of most skilled device, but no very great purpose and substance, this he is from beginning to end of his creation. His art suffers from the excess of value of form over value of content; it incurs a liability to a besetting note of artificiality, a frequent falsetto tone of prettiness, an excessive stress, a colouring which is often too bright for the stuff it hues and is unevenly laid, but it is always taking and effective. By his very limitation of mind he becomes the representative poet of a certain side of the English mentality, not in its originality and adventurous power, but in its temperate convention and fixity, renders its liberalism and its conservatism, its love of freedom and dislike of idealism, its surface common sense of doubt and traditional belief, its successful way of dealing with its material, its formal ethicism and its absence of passion. But to all these things he brings an artistic decorative quality which is new in English poetry. He has left his stamp on the language and has given starting-points and forms for poets of a rarer force to turn to greater uses and pass beyond them to a new construction.