Broadly speaking, Tennyson and Browning have come in general opinion to stand as the two chief figures in Victorian poetry. Personal revisions of this estimate are constantly being made, and often with much critical weight. But on the whole, and considering everything that goes to the making of permanence in poetic reputations, it is doubtful whether the popular impression will not continue to hold the day. In detail the debate is an endless one, nor, so far as mere comparison is concerned, is it a very profitable one. I for one find Matthew Arnold, for instance, a more rewarding poet, with less waste tissue in his work, and as time goes on richer in undiscovered country than either Tennyson or Browning, but I should not allow my personal preference to place him above them in poetic rank—the evidence against me is too weighty for that. In the matter of diction which we have been discussing, for example, in so far as poets can affect their own age, Tennyson and Browning were beyond question the two most considerable influences of their time. Tennyson showed his generation, in a degree unapproached by any other poet who began writing with him, the still fresh and vital possibilities of a great traditional manner. Browning with equal authority demonstrated what were the likeliest methods of departure and revolt from that manner. It is true that while Tennyson’s example modified the versification of many poets in his own age, Browning’s, though perhaps a more durable one, was far less immediate in its effect. There was a definitely Tennysonian school, a number of accomplished and genuine poets who would almost certainly have written differently if it had not been for the direct influence of the master, who, moreover, considerably affected the poetic expression of many, indeed of most, of his more celebrated contemporaries. Here are a few instances from the school—

I need hardly say that I do not suggest that the poets from whom these examples—almost at random—are given, and many who could be placed in their company, are merely imitators of Tennyson. 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. Generally speaking, this was all to the good. Predominating influences are inevitable among any generation of poets, and it was no bad fortune for a large number of the Victorians to find so good a preceptor. With one possible exception, everything that these poets of real but not commanding achievement got from Tennyson was gain. They took from him no eccentricity, but each according to his own powers something of his new interpretation of a tradition that was the common heritage. The possible exception was de Tabley, who, the more he is read, the more he impresses with his very rare potentialities. He, perhaps, alone among the poets of anything like his natural endowment, made at times too complete a surrender to example. A careful study of his verse convinces me that the lapses from excellence, of which it is in danger at every turn, are almost entirely the result of an habitual recollection, in relaxed moods, of Tennyson’s manner, which in happier moments influenced him wholly for good. If, as I have already suggested, he more than the others could sometimes catch the particular enchantment in Tennyson’s use of words, the enchantment that save for a stray note here and there came and went with the master, he also suffered more than the others by reason of his very sensibility. He could write—

but he could also write—

Before returning to Browning, we may consider the influence that Tennyson further had—Tennyson, that is again to say, as representing the age’s normal modification of tradition—upon the diction of the more celebrated poets of the Victorian era. Matthew Arnold published his first book—The Strayed Reveller and other Poems (apart from prize poems at Rugby and Oxford) in 1849, when he was twenty-seven years of age, and his second, Empedocles on Etna, three years later. So little attention was paid to books that contained some of the loveliest poetry of a century, that their author successively withdrew each of them from publication when a few copies had gone out, and they have become bibliographical treasures. With the two volumes of Poems, 1853 and 1855, however, he took his place among the acknowledged poets of the time, and although he has never been everybody’s poet, he has never since then been without admirers who would hardly admit any of his contemporaries as his better. The nature of his poetry will be referred to in the proper place, but its diction is of great importance in a study of the age’s versification. Professor Saintsbury[13] (who is just a little inclined to stand for the illiberal estimate of Arnold as a poet) says “he is most consistent in employing, or at least endeavouring to employ, a severer kind of diction and versification, drawing itself back from the florid and flowing Tennysonian scheme towards the stiffer movement and graver tones of Wordsworth, Gray, and (in his later years) Milton.” This is very perspicuous, but the very fact that there was in Arnold’s style something of a conscious drawing back from Tennyson’s manner implies that the influence of the older poet was by no means without its effect, and we shall find plainly that this was so. The fact is that Tennyson, “florid and flowing” as he may have been at times, was far from unconscious in much of his finest work of those models to whom Arnold is said to have turned by way of escape as it were. Neither Milton nor Gray nor Wordsworth could have written more gravely-toned than this, the Tennyson of Ulysses—

and, on the other hand, it is impossible to miss Tennyson’s modification of those models in much of Arnold’s representative poetry, or at least not to be aware that Arnold’s own instinct is moving in the same direction.

If that is a return to an older manner, it is an older manner with a difference, and the difference is one that in the first place was of Tennyson’s invention. Arnold was too personal a poet not to invest even his acquired characteristics with his own stamp, but when we read verse like this we know that Milton, Gray and Wordsworth were not the only masters. And, in fact, Tennyson’s particular “linked sweetness long drawn out” was not more certainly achieved by its originator himself than by Arnold in such passages as—

and

and

and

Instances could be multiplied: they abound in Arnold’s poetry. It is true that Arnold did, more perhaps than any other poet of his time, bring back into verse something of the hard, jade-like, quality in a phrase that was characteristic of Milton, and almost even more so of Donne, Vaughan and many seventeenth-century lyrists, in a smaller degree of Gray and Wordsworth, hardly attempted by Keats, and less by Tennyson. It was a quality, it may perhaps be said, borrowed by poetry from the great prose writers such as Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Browne and Izaak Walton. It is a subtle quality, one difficult to get at or define, a very attractive thing when well used, and yet a quality to which many good poets are indifferent. When Tennyson writes, “His captain’s ear has heard them boom Bellowing victory, bellowing doom,” and Browning “And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue,” and Aubrey de Vere “while such perfect sound Fell from his bowstring,” and Poe “Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche,” and Longfellow “We can make our lives sublime,” and Browning again “There’s heaven above, and night by night, I look right through its gorgeous roof,” the words bellowing, exquisite, perfect, brilliant (though Poe very nearly justifies himself), sublime, and gorgeous are all words badly used in poetry, mere counters taken lazily from the fingered stock of prose.[14] 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. He may say the moon is bright, because that means something definite, but he may not say the moon is exquisite, because that does not mean anything definite at all. And he may not even say the moon is brilliant—or at least not with any safety—because brilliant only means bright, which is definite, plus a qualification which is quite indefinite; it pretends to say something more than bright, but leaves us uninformed as to what the something more is, and so becomes a pretentious word. If the poet wants to emphasise the brightness he can do so by means of an image, or even by saying very bright, if he can, as sometimes he can, beguile us into honouring the “very” by rhythmic cunning. But “brilliant” in poetry is inorganic. Sublime, bellowing, gorgeous and the rest of them belong to a large group of words that are over-specific or under-specific in meaning for poetry. “Bellowing” implies a very particular kind of loud noise, but that particularity is of no significance, and all that the word gives us in Tennyson’s verse over and above, say, “sounding,” is something that it is not worth while to give; it is too specific, so that in poetry it acquires a certain kind of fatuity. “Gorgeous,” on the other hand, is not specific enough. The margin of meaning in it beyond some such word as bright or starry or shining or, perhaps, encrusted, is something known only vaguely to each person as he uses it, and not communicated in any definite way by the word itself. “Gorgeous roof” means nothing, in the sense that it is poetry’s obligation to mean something, that is not accounted for by “starry roof.” The added meaning remains something secret to Browning. It is of no use in this connection to talk about poetry being “suggestive.” The suggestive power of poetry should be something that compels us to an effort of the mind that results in the creation of a clear-cut image, not something directing us into a world of vague sensations and guesswork.

Before proceeding to the next step in the analysis of the quality that I have claimed for Arnold, there is another group of words to be considered that might at first thought seem to be of the same kind as those just mentioned. Perhaps “magnificent” is as good an example as any. Why, it may be asked, should “magnificent” be suitable for poetic use if “gorgeous” is not? Clearly we are on very hazardous ground, but the way is, I think, none the less certain. We know that instinct has told the common practice of poetry to accept the one and to reject the other, and the instinct must have had some source in reason. Admitting that what we need in poetry is exact definition, it can, I think, be shown that there is this difference between the two words. “Gorgeous,” in itself, means (let us say) “splendid” plus some unknown degree of “splendour.” It is not a case of splendour of one kind plus—even though it be in an unknown degree—splendour of another. So that it depends for its very particularity upon a meaning that finally escapes us, and not even Milton with his “Gorgeous Tragedy” can quite subdue it to his art. But with “magnificent” this is not so. The meaning is still “splendid” (let us say) plus something, but the something is not now merely an undefined further quantity of “splendour.” It is, rather, a particular qualification of splendour which is derived from the context, and which, from the context, will nearly always be found to be imaginatively specific. Thus, when Wordsworth says—

the figure of “the East” is hardly emphasised at all by “gorgeous.” “Splendid” alone would have done the work as well, and not have disturbed our sense of fitness by any pretentiousness. If Wordsworth, we feel, wanted to say more than that the East was splendid, to convey the distinguishing quality of that splendour, it was his business to do it somehow precisely, and not to evade his responsibility by using a word that, so far as qualification of “splendid” goes, leaves us in the air. And, from some subtle essence in its nature, the word “magnificent” would have served his turn. Had he said “the magnificent East,” we should—or so it seems decisively to my perception—have received the idea of “splendid” from the primary meaning of the epithet, which epithet would in turn have, by its peculiar evocative power, gathered to itself from the context the explicit kind of splendour of light and colour and jewelled opulence that we associate with the East. The word “magnificent,” in short, is an organic one in poetry, while “gorgeous” is not. When Browning speaks of “that pulse’s magnificent come-and-go,” we get the image of glowing health reinforced by the idea of a superb physical power and functioning, conveyed through the word “magnificent” in relation to “pulse.” “Splendid” here would have been measurably less significant, while “gorgeous”—if we may strain the word’s meaning for the purpose of illustration—would, in qualifying “splendid,” have weakened the impression instead of strengthening it. Again, as a last example, Sir William Watson in his Autumn has, within a few lines of each other—

and

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; and transparent, crystalline; and regrettable or deplorable as against lamentable or grievous; and vicious, malignant; and vague, dim; and conceited, vain; and expensive, costly, and so on. It is hardly safe to say of any word that it can never be used seriously in poetry, but of those given as belonging to the “gorgeous” group—there are hundreds like them—it can at least be said that poetry would almost always lose more than she would gain by them.

Arnold’s gift of bringing a certain spare prose quality with profit into his poetry is not, therefore, to be observed in his use of such words as “magnificent” and the rest, which are naturally enough poetic, and not dangerous so long as they are kept clearly distinguished from the specifically prose “gorgeous” group. Nor, again, as we have seen, is it to be found in his control of such simplicities as “the sun is bright,” since these also are—or can be in right usage—essentially poetic. Also it is a distinct thing from that other simplicity that relies at moments of almost overwhelming emotion upon an expression stripped of every syllable that can go and yet, throbbing with momentum, having nothing in it of understatement; the kind of expression of which Shakespeare was the supreme master—

and

and

The quality of which we are speaking in Arnold was, rather, a certain sudden tempering of the diction in poetry, with magical result. It was a quality that he more than any other poet of his time recovered from the seventeenth century, the age of poets like Vaughan and Marvell who could lift us to the height of poetic enjoyment with such prose-habited devices as—

and

These are not at all in the same kind as “She should have died hereafter.” They depend for their effect not upon the sudden release of vast cumulative passion, but upon the lovely—almost arrogant—draft upon commonplace, the perfectly judged use of “friends” and “fine” at their utterly unexpected but divinely appointed moments. And this effect Arnold could often come by, and the rest of the Victorians hardly ever. Here are two examples—

and

The instinct that led Arnold to such expression as this was akin to an austerity, sometimes stupidly confused with coldness, that is among the rarest and most secluded of poetry’s enchantments, the austerity of which the poet himself wrote—

If Arnold stood in his age for a chastening of the “florid and flowing” Tennysonian manner, though less unequivocally so, perhaps, than Professor Saintsbury would seem to suggest, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Swinburne, in their respective ways, carried that manner to its extreme emphasis. This, I need hardly say, does not mean that the style of any of these men was exclusively derived from Tennyson, but rather that the characteristic evolved by Tennyson from poetic tradition that warrants Professor Saintsbury’s “florid and flowing,” was developed by these younger poets into a poetic diction that was drawn partly from Tennyson’s own sources and partly from Tennyson himself. Just as the influence of Milton, Gray and Wordsworth upon Arnold was modified by the intervening practice of Tennyson, so was the influence of Chaucer, Spenser, Shelley, Byron and Keats in some measure affected by Tennyson before they reached Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne.

To set Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel beside one of Tennyson’s most highly decorative poems, The Lady of Shalott, for example, is to be aware of a new weight in an atmosphere already heavily charged. The graphic presentation of Tennyson’s poem is wrought with great ingenuity of artifice, but the landscape, although it no longer has the rain-washed clarity of Chaucer, is still in the open air. The golden sheaves and the Camelot road and the lilied island have something of the brightness of unfaded tapestry, but they have something also of summer in Cornwall. In The Blessed Damozel we have passed out of day and night and are moving in a landscape of gold and blue and rose thickly laid on gesso and stuck over with precious stones. It glows through a mist of colour that is almost sensible to the touch, and has been passionately created, not by God in Cornwall, but by monks in mediæval cloisters. In Tennyson’s poem there is the artifice of a very expert poetic craftsman, applied to a vision that is direct and material, in Rossetti’s there is a genuine artificiality of imagination, expressing itself in a diction suffused with suggestion that is at once ethereal and strictly formal.

These are no waters of earth, nor are the lilies and the stars—the three and the seven—those of our familiar vision. The water is some pool beyond the well at the world’s end, and the lilies and the stars are such as might have been held one in each hand by the Prologue to a fourteenth-century mystery play at the church porch.

It is not a sufficient explanation of this to say merely that Rossetti was a painter as well as a poet. Nor was it wholly that he, beyond the example of any poet before him, sought to wring the last voluptuous essence out of the very nature of words themselves. Nor, finally, was diction of this kind simply the inevitable consequence of the deliberate Pre-Raphaelite pact. Beyond all these contributary causes, there was in Rossetti a native distrust of common life, kept by his artistic vitality just this side of morbidity, that led him to the creation of a world, lustrous, brooding, its fauna and flora always a little fabulous, a world of murmured incantations and living heraldry. Here Rossetti suffered the pangs and gathered the compensations common to humanity, but his emotion, simple in character though it was, found its natural element in this embroidered and incense-laden world, and could not easily fulfil itself elsewhere. And in the diction of his poetry Rossetti delineated his world exactly, with its “twilit hidden glimmering visages.” Hardly any other poet, I suppose, could have praised the beloved for her “sultry hair.”

Morris was profoundly influenced by Rossetti in his art, and there was a close personal sympathy between them, and yet two poets could not well be more unlike each other in natural temperament. Rossetti’s heavy-lidded indolence, his exotic preference for odd beasts in the garden, his savour of the apothecary’s shop, were far removed from the robust worldliness of Morris, who loved Socialist meetings, and Cotswold winds, and the dye-vats in a Staffordshire mill, and fishing for pike in the Thames, and even a row in a police-court. But the instinct for definite outline and exact detail that made him whole-hearted in his sympathy with the Pre-Raphaelite painters in their revolt from what they considered to be a smudgy and lazy impressionism, made him also very susceptible to the luminous and graphic quality of Rossetti’s diction, and, in that measure, guided him to his own development of the “florid and flowing” Tennysonian idiom. But once the impulse was working, it sent Morris along his own way of discovery, one upon which he had no company of importance. As he progressed in his art from The Lady of Shalott and The Blessed Damozel, from the lovely exercise of—

the world of mediæval and classic story became less and less mere material for his poetry and more and more the actual place of his habitation. No poet has ever so utterly projected himself into another age as did Morris. Much has been written to show that Morris of The Earthly Paradise and Morris of the political platform were one and the same person, and the doctrine cannot be lightly dismissed. But in a sense Sigurd and Jason and Gudrun and Atalanta were more vividly and intimately his fellows than the chairman and committee and the men and women of his audience. Though he did not tell them so exactly in so many words, his real ambition in going on to the political platform at all was to persuade these men and women that the Sigurds and the Atalantas were really the best company in all the world, and there willingly for their delight if they would but know them. And in moving among these people of a golden age (these people, that is to say, as recorded by the old poets, Chaucer and the troubadours and trouvères) Morris not only steeped himself in their physical and spiritual life, he very largely caught and re-created the very manner of their expression. He did something in the diction of his poetry that had never before and is never likely again to be attempted successfully, he made an archaic idiom a living, personal, and original thing. The complaint about “Wardour Street” diction that has sometimes been made against Morris is stupid and indefensible. His poetic style may not please us in all moods, but when we are prepared for it we see that, unlikely as was his method to bring about such an event by the light of experience, it is as purely and individually a style as any poet’s, and that he has borrowed nothing without transmuting it to the strict degree of his obligation. When he follows Chaucer’s example and speaks of the brown bird, or the grey sky, or the bright flowers, and leaves it at that, we find ourselves accepting the image as complete, so naturally does he adopt the accent of a fourteenth-century poet and so far do we seem from the nineteenth century merely imitating the fourteenth. And the whole of his diction is radically modified by this circumstance, thus—

And even when his immediate concern, as in The Message of the March Wind, is with the life of an age that is his own by accident as it were, the manner still prevails—

Criticism may tell us that “the land” is an inadequate generalisation, that to say merely that it is “sweet” to be straying through it is to say nothing, that “the birds and the blossoms and the beasts” are poetic counters, that “where all sorrow is heal’d” is a sentimental cliché dragged in for purposes of rhyme, that “from township to township” makes no figure on the map, that “long was the day” is trite, and so on to its silly heart’s content. But if, when it has finished, it fails to perceive the living spirit of poetry in those stanzas of Morris’s, then we at least are not called upon to waste our energy in disputing the matter.

Tennyson’s first book (excluding the Poems by Two Brothers) was published in 1830, Arnold’s in 1849, Rossetti’s in 1870, Morris’s in 1858, and Swinburne’s in 1860, although Atalanta in Calydon and Poems and Ballads, by which volumes the character of his genius first fully asserted itself, did not appear until 1865 and 1866 respectively. Rossetti was six years older than Morris and eight years older than Swinburne, but he kept his poems, though they were well known to his friends, unpublished in book-form for many years. Among them all, Swinburne, the youngest, is the most perplexing as a poet. Leaving the content matter of his poetry for mention in the proper place, we find in his manner the apotheosis of the technique of an age, we might almost say of many ages. With a poetic scholarship as liberal as and more widely read than Arnold’s, an ear as sensitive to the harmonics of words as Tennyson’s, a gift of incantation as befumed as Rossetti’s, a sense of romantic story as poignant and of English landscape as tender and sparkling as was Morris’s, and a metrical virtuosity that was unknown to any of them, or, indeed, to any other English poet, Swinburne was, technically, at once the most unoriginal and the most accomplished of the great men of his age. Of the particular poetic beauty that we have examined in Arnold—the beauty of “prophets and friends of God”—he had nothing; the spare enchantment of the seventeenth-century lyric was the one eminent grace in the stores of English poetry that he did not gather up to his own uses. He, again, went to the sources partly through Tennyson, and, remembering this, it would perhaps put the matter in a word to say that it would be a safe undertaking to match any particular excellence in Tennyson’s diction, or in that of any of the poets who were influenced in Tennyson’s direction, with a corresponding excellence somewhere to be found in the work of Swinburne.

In a passage such as this, not considering the nature of the content matter, and setting aside qualities in the style peculiar to Swinburne, there is clearly sounded in the actual writing the note that distinguished Victorian poetry from the poetry of earlier ages. The quality in this which is distinctively Swinburne’s own, as it is in the great body of his work, is one in which the effect of metrical movement, or more precisely the play of metrical movement upon diction, is more important than it commonly was in the verse of his contemporaries. As I have suggested earlier in this essay, the technical originality of poetry by the time that Tennyson began to write, if not, indeed, before that, was to be sought rather in diction, the elements of which we have discussed, and in rhythmic currents moving along more or less established metrical channels, than in actual metrical invention. But Swinburne more than any other poet of his time calls for modification of this statement. To distinguish rhythmic beat from metrical pattern is difficult, perhaps impossible to do by any rule-of-thumb. But a careful examination of Swinburne’s verse as a whole reveals that, in comparison with poets of his own stature, he had little rhythmic subtlety, a diction that was superbly copious but seldom touched with the rarer magic of discovery, and a metrical genius that, in its power, its variety and its essential artistic significance, may be said without over-statement to remain beyond the approach of any other English poet. While most people would, I think, accept the generalisation without question, in so far as it concerns Swinburne’s diction, they might question it in respect of rhythm and metre. The average reader of poetry, whose business rightly is to enjoy what he is reading before coming to a close analysis of its nature, should he come to that at all, if asked what most struck him in Swinburne’s poetry would probably say that it was its rich and intoxicating rhythm. The trained critical mind, on the other hand, might assert that, masterly as Swinburne’s metrical performance was, it was hardly ever metrical invention. Both would be difficult to answer, and yet I think both might be persuaded. We have only to take any characteristic passage from one of the supreme creators of rhythmical life, such as Shakespeare and Milton and 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. And on the other hand, while it would be dangerous to say that any single metrical form used by Swinburne could not be shown to have its model in an older use, his metrical abundance and ingenuity are so great, the new combinations he makes so many and fortunate, the effect he produces so incisive and unforgettable, that his use of metre may reasonably enough be allowed as an original achievement of genius. It is not difficult to support the whole position by a single poem or, indeed, by two stanzas of a single poem.