Victorian Poetry

In connection with his diction it will be convenient at first to consider a single poem of Tennyson’s, which embodies most of the characteristics of his style—this from In Memoriam—

First in these lines is apparent a poetic virtue of which Tennyson was an almost constant master, the faculty for seeing a natural object in minutely exact definition. “Thro’ the faded leaf The chestnut pattering to the ground,” the “dews that drench the furze,” the whole of the third stanza, the “waves that sway themselves in rest,” each phrase is incontrovertible evidence of a thing personally seen with creative intensity. In the first of these examples we see how Tennyson could manage that elaboration of the simple statement, which is the first of the four problems that have been discussed as awaiting him. If Chaucer had been presenting an autumn landscape—which, in his preoccupation with spring, he very rarely did—and had wanted to use foliage as a figure, he would almost certainly have been content with “the faded leaf” without embellishment, and from his tongue the economy would have been convincing. But by Tennyson’s time the phrase by itself would have been something barren, and it needed fertilising by some further imaginative life. To the simple image Tennyson adds another, and together they brighten into one perfect realisation. Faded leaves, falling chestnuts—there for any schoolboy’s observation, and yet, placed thus exactly, the witnesses of a rich poetic power in full exercise. And whenever Tennyson felt called upon to intensify the simple statement of a natural object, he was able to do it by reference to his own vivid experience, and thus to deal satisfactorily with the problem in question, and also, so far as the delineation of landscape (as apart from the further questions of human emotion and character) was concerned, to keep his yellow sands away from coral. If he wants to speak of marshy waste-lands, the “glooming flats” of Lincolnshire are to mind for his purpose, and the “glooming” is the signature written at once; if the violets were to blow, he had seen them “thick by ashen roots”; and even the familiar poppy in sleep he has seen precisely hanging from “the craggy ledge.” I have said that Tennyson heightened his images in this way whenever he felt called upon to do so—called upon, that is to say, by the unaccountable poetic impulse. It was, even with so deliberate an artist, no matter of course to do this, and he was often, and by a just instinct, content to leave the simple image in its simplicity, though he would be careful not to leave it unfortified by some such intensification near at hand. Love is to be looked for not only “by the happy threshold” but also

though sometimes the poet leaves magic to the barest statement with an entirely just confidence, as in—

where even Chaucer is matched for rich economy of descriptive effect. In which connection it may be as well here to remark that Tennyson was a notable example of the poets who pass in the evolution of their style from a luxuriously decorative manner to this same economy as a final characteristic. And it is a characteristic that can be arrived at through evolution only, it can never as it were be jumped at in the beginning. The simplicity of ignorance is inevitably bald commonplace, but the simplicity slowly achieved out of a vast poetic experience may be Crossing the Bar. It may be worth while to look again at this noble lyric, set beside something of the poet’s early luxuriance. The Lady of Shalott was written when he was twenty-three years old:—

The missal-like illumination of verse such as this will be further mentioned, but for the moment I want merely to contrast it with this, written sixty years later, when the poet was over eighty:—

In the diction of that there is a serene directness that has been won only out of many years of technical liberality.

The second of our problems in diction, that of keeping clear of words with a too definitely associative value, Tennyson met in his best work by a steady concentration on his own subject. Although in actual craftsmanship he was sophisticated and selective in a far more than common degree, an unusually self-conscious artist, in the spiritual and emotional content of his poetry Tennyson had hardly any virtuosity at all. His success or failure in philosophic originality will be discussed in a later section of this essay, but the point here is that in the experiences of his soul he may often have been strangely disingenuous for a major poet, but he was always absolutely himself. His poetic technique is clearly and manifoldly subject to influence—Shakespeare, Milton, Pope even, Byron by glimpses, Keats—without any one of these his manner would have been a little different, but upon the emotional life of his poetry there is practically no literary influence discernible at all. The tumultuous passion of the Elizabethans, the subtle lay metaphysic of Donne, Milton’s darkly voluptuous Puritanism, Herrick’s exquisitely tutored rustic urbanity, Wordsworth’s moral clairvoyance—all these might never have existed in poetry at all for the traces of them to be found in the self-portraiture figured in Tennyson’s art. Whether the fact is to be accounted as a defect or a virtue depends upon what we ask of poetry. To return to our passage from In Memoriam—

we cannot but at once allow the obvious excellence of the mere writing, but if we want acute analysis of sorrow in her more elusive moods or discovering flights of mysticism, we shall find little enough of satisfaction. Here is nothing but the most childlike assertion of calm grief and its reflection in the calm dissolution of an autumn landscape. 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, 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 the “calm is the morn” passage there is not a word that is obviously reminiscent. Tennyson’s mind may be a figure of homespun in the intellectual world, but it can appear in any company without the slightest embarrassment and apparently without any temptation to ape livelier or more ceremonious wits. This poet was in a literal sense too simple to be in even remote danger of borrowing “sessions.”

Of the journalistic virus Tennyson’s style cannot be said to be so entirely free. When he was concerned with the life of his own moods he was, as has just been said, proof against poetic suggestion from without, but when his subject was some public occasion or some external event that only accidentally came within his own experience, he was not so wholly proof against the clichés of journalism. It is true that he was one of the best occasional poets in the language, and particularly in the graver manner of his laureate office. And yet, even in the justly famous Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington there is, in parts at least, a lower level of integrity in expression than, for example again, in our passage from In Memoriam, where, with the doubtful exception of “that noble breast,” there is not a word that is not manifestly of the poet’s own minting. 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. It was hardly the Tennyson of the finest authority whom we find addressing Nelson thus—

and Wellington as—

and as being

who called upon an unregenerate world to

and exclaimed that on Napoleon’s overthrow at Waterloo

These are not the simplicities of

nor of such things as this, from the Ode itself—

Nor, on the other hand, are the passages here questioned, and others like them, instances of the lowered tension in writing such as we often find introduced with artistic propriety into narrative poetry. They are, rather, indications that the poet is momentarily relaxed in creative attention, and borrowing, and from a bad source at that. Other examples may be found by those who care to look for them, in both Locksley Halls, and in a way, though less evidently and with more excuse, from such amusing exercises as the Northern Farmer poems.

That has humorous charm, and as a tour de force in writing its merit is obvious. But it comes something short of poetry, because it is fundamentally an expression which is not natural to the poet. It is witty and extremely sensitive reporting, but it is no more, in so far, that is to say, as the diction is concerned, the selective and shaping power of art not being here in question. In saying that poetic language should be based on common idiom, we mean an idiom that is naturally within the poet’s range, part of his own expressive habit, not an idiom that he deliberately copies. The Northern Farmer poems remain brilliant strokes of virtuosity, but Tennyson the poet had very little to do with them. It must be repeated, however, that in the great body of his work that explores the world of his own emotions, his response to nature and his simple but ever-brooding speculation, there is hardly a hint of the journalist confusing the poet.

Tennyson in relation to the fourth of our problems, that of allowing natural objects to call up ready-shaped images in association from the stores of poetry, has already been briefly considered in connection with his faded leaf and falling chestnut. And in this matter he was no more troubled when the content of his poetry was something other than natural description and its inferences. He writes—

but so intent is the mood that the siren voices of literature are beyond hearing, and on a sea unruffled by any alien wind

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. But the readers of the volumes of 1830 and 1833 could not but be aware that here was the old faculty speaking with a note of new personality, an impression to be strikingly confirmed in 1842. This was English poetry plainly enough, quite content to give tradition its due, properly proud of its ancestry, and yet it was the work of a man deeply engaged, indeed almost reclusively so, in the artistic ordering of his own spiritual life. In so far as he satisfactorily solved the technical problems that have been mentioned, he did so by a subconscious instinct of the creative mind—they cannot, it is needless to say, have appeared to him in the simple tabulation that we are able to give them at this distance of time. But the instinct that performed this office for him told him too that in drawing freely upon the tradition of English versification he must also add to it to be justified of his calling. This is true of every poet, but Tennyson knew it more decidedly, or at least more explicitly, than most. Tennyson’s subject matter could not well have been more unsophisticated, less affected by the challenge of the spiritual experience of the great poets who preceded him; but at the same time his style could not well have been more manipulated, more meticulously and self-consciously wrought into the highest excellence that he could attain. 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 are merely so much decoration, a kind of seductive jugglery that used up good energy that might have been better employed. It was his peculiar distinction as a poetic craftsman that he was able to work his style to the highest pitch of minutely considered arrangement without sacrificing anything of spontaneity in effect.

The stanzas quoted from The Lady of Shalott show something of Tennyson’s deftness in the disposition of his words. A more matured example is this from The Princess—

A good deal has been said by critics about Tennyson’s mastery over vowel and consonantal movement, but, in the light of such instances as this, certainly not more than enough, and in these later days at least rather less, I think, than is due. It is easy for unsympathetic criticism to see nothing but manufactured verse in this poem, but it is always easy for unsympathetic criticism to be stupidly unjust. This is not merely fine writing, it is style, and not to allow this is to be wanton about Tennyson altogether. Whatever personal taste may say, considered judgment should not permit itself to be blinded thus by partialities. That the artistry in these lines is deliberate, proving itself at every word, indeed at every letter, is unquestionable, but it is equally clear that the fusion of a poetic mood into this limpidly composed expression is complete. The perfect packing or building of the words, as though they had something of the quality of solid material in them, was for Tennyson an actual means of expression, and one in which he has never been excelled, and, perhaps, never equalled. Under analysis two lines in the poem call for separate comment.

is exquisitely done, but detraction might protest that it is just a shade too assertively picturesque, and there is, moreover, for once a definite reminiscence of Keats with his “beaded bubbles winking at the brim.” The line is, in some odd way, almost too good. Then we have that other one,

which stands out by itself, as it would do in any context, by sheer imaginative power. But the poem for the rest is a normal illustration of Tennyson’s method. The verbal opulence is peculiarly his own. 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 charge a poet with merely using words we can only mean that he is using impoverished words. 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. “Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,” “Now slides the silent meteor on,” “Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, And slips into the bosom of the lake”—these words are revealing something at Tennyson’s touch that they had kept to themselves before. What precisely it is we cannot say, because it exists only in terms of Tennyson’s divine manipulation. We can talk, rationally enough, about vowels and consonants, but we are still compelled to leave something unsaid. But we miss much of the essential Tennyson if we do not recognise that in his orchestration of language he was, in a sense almost peculiar to himself among poets, creating life. “The chestnut pattering to the ground,” already quoted, may be given as another case in point. “Pattering” is here something more than the best word in the usual sense. It is true that it is more precise than “falling,” or “dropping,” but when that margin of superiority is allowed for there is still something over. And that something is not a lucky but inessential grace; it is life, and life of Tennyson’s especial engendering.

This was, I think, Tennyson’s particular enrichment of the tradition that he took up. A few other poets, Rossetti, for example, and others less celebrated, such as de Tabley, caught something of the way of it, but on the whole it was a very personal thing, perfected by its originator,[4] and not having any lasting influence. With Tennyson came and went the vital undertone of such lines as—

If it was heard again it could be as an echo only.