There would seem to be two different kinds of material upon which the poetic faculty can be employed. The old distinction of subjective and objective has become loose in usage, as is the fate of all definitions, but it is not a bad one for working purposes. If in the discussion of æsthetics we begin to qualify our definitions too exactly we are apt to finish up in a world of unintelligible refinements. Words when used in argument have not the same quality and should not be expected to perform the same functions as they do in poetry, qualities and functions the nature of which has already been suggested. All modern moralising, for example, has tended towards the rejection of such plain words as good and bad. We no longer speak of a good man and a bad man as the Old Testament and Bunyan did, and we can show very good reasons for the rejection. Psychology has taught us that it is quite unsafe to call any one just good or bad and leave it at that, and it is one of the achievements of modern literary art, particularly in the drama and in fiction, to explore with great subtlety the gradations by which good and bad merge into each other in a single character. Nevertheless, after such analysis has exhausted itself with every ingenuity, there remain the words good and bad, and in the ordinary communication of ideas we do know, with more or less precision, what is meant when some one of normal intelligence tells us that so and so is a good man or a bad man. And so with such words as objective and subjective in the consideration of æsthetics. It is perfectly true to say that no subject matter controlled by a poet’s art can ever be wholly one or the other, but it is also true to say that if a narrative poem like The Lay of the Last Minstrel is spoken of as being objective in nature, and a philosophical self-analysis like The Prelude as being subjective, we know clearly enough what is meant. 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. It is not that The Lay of the Last Minstrel, in presenting a graphic pageant of life external to Scott’s own personal experience, has nothing of that experience woven into it, nor is it that The Prelude in its constant concern with Wordsworth’s own spiritual processes has no observation towers that look out on to the open road. But the external pageantry on the one hand and the self-analysis on the other are quite clearly the predominant motives of the respective poems, just as they are perfectly mated in King Lear, where there is at once everything of the vivid perception of a detached life that can be found in Scott, and everything of deep spiritual responsibility that can be found in Wordsworth, the one now transfigured by passion and the other lit by a new imaginative variety. With so much definition, therefore, the terms subjective and objective may be used for our present purposes.

Scott’s poems are the best examples in English of poetry that is purely, or almost purely, objective. And the neglect of more recent criticism has, I suspect, left them still in the possession of the affections of many readers. They are not only the best of their kind, they could not very well be better. The finer narrative art of Chaucer, suffused as it was by a much more personal contact with its content matter, stands really in æsthetic significance, apart from the question of individual genius, with the art that produced King Lear. In the Victorian age the art of Scott found its inheritors, and, although the schoolmasters have done their best to kill The Lays of Ancient Rome, Macaulay was no bad practitioner in a kind of which we are foolish to speak slightingly because it does not happen to be the highest. If we can forget the class-room and put prejudice aside, and keep our sense of values clear, there is something amiss with us if we do not thrill to passages, of which there are many in the Lays, such as

and

Macaulay was not by habit or any deep artistic intention a poet at all, and the Lays are little more than spirited footnotes to his history, a point aptly made by Professor Hugh Walker in his scholarly study of Victorian literature, but as such they are the work of a very vivid talent and have a secure if humble place among the memorable poetry of their age. There is no work of the time exactly comparable to Macaulay’s unless it be that of William Edmondstoune Aytoun, but the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, far from being without merit though they are, have no special characteristics that call for mention here.

All the greater poets of the age tried their hand at some time or another at objective narrative verse, but Morris alone among them made narrative a chief concern of his art. The Life and Death of Jason, The Earthly Paradise and Sigurd the Volsung,[17] together make up a body of narrative poetry by virtue of which it would be difficult to call Morris in this kind the inferior of any one but Chaucer. Morris had not Chaucer’s sense of character, nor his humour, nor, perhaps, the variety of his invention, but in pure narrative gift, the art of keeping the reader’s attention fixed upon the progress of a long story, it is doubtful whether he is to be placed even below Chaucer himself. It is, however, when we call to mind that quality in Chaucer which, I have suggested, gives his art something of the comprehensiveness that is supremely achieved in King Lear, that we feel Morris, great poet though he was, to have been definitely the less considerable man of the two. Morris loved the world of his invention, and loved it passionately, but his narrative poetry is not quite authoritatively marked by his own spiritual agonies and exultations. In speaking of so noble a poet, and one so rich in pleasure-giving, one would say nothing that should savour at any distance of disparagement. Nor is Morris to be belittled because Chaucer was his master, not only by example, but by achievement. At the same time, in Morris’s narrative poetry, however splendidly it may compel every other honour, there is to those who love it a perplexing something which leaves it short of the very highest. In a strange and impalpable way it seems as though he had withheld some last heart-beat from its creation. His claim, frequently made, that the writing of poetry was easy is not without some symbolic significance. It may have been that Morris was too happy a man to be quite among the very greatest poets. His verse stories leave us with a feeling that he is not utterly exhausted after the act of creation, that the figures of his invention, tender and virile though they are, remain outside the inner secrecies of his own emotion. There is, in fact, a larger preponderance of exclusively objective intention in his work than in Chaucer’s, and by so much he means the less in the final poetic reckoning. This is not to forget that, by comparison with any narrative poet other than Chaucer, Morris’s work is flooded with subjective passion, far beyond that of Macaulay or of Scott himself. In the earlier part of this study I have suggested that Morris really lived in the world of his stories more actually than in the nineteenth century, and that is, I think, the truth. But his capacity for imaginative life at all, immense though it was, had always just a strain of decorative facility that marked it a little apart from the constant imaginative pressure that we find in Chaucer. Morris told us magnificent stories, very moving and quick with heroic life, and to read them is to pass into a world of living and significant romance. But, remembering our own mortality, he has not the touch of revelation that was so easily Chaucer’s, not quite the same breath of apocalyptic love.

The narrative work of the other great Victorian poets hardly calls for special consideration, being incidental to and of a part with their normal practice, not the result, as with Morris, of a specific artistic plan. But at this point a word may be said of the many dramas that were written during the age, in which we should expect from the nature of this form something of that unification which has been referred to in what has been said about Chaucer and King Lear. The Victorian poets as playwrights, and they nearly all tried their hands at the craft, suffered from the radical disability of having no living theatre in which to learn their craft and in which to see their invention come to full embodiment. This is not the place to discuss the reasons why it came about, but the fact remains that when Tennyson began to write the English theatre had long since driven out the spirit of poetry, and continued to enforce the exile during the whole of his long life. The waste of energy incurred by Tennyson and Browning and Morris and Swinburne and Arnold, not to name a number of less celebrated men, in the writing of plays (of the succession of poets preceding them the same thing could be said) is one of the tragic futilities both of English literature and of the English theatre. It was a time when the actor had achieved complete ascendency in the theatre and when what he wanted was, not creative poets whose works he could perform, but hack playwrights who could serve the purpose of his own histrionic virtuosity. 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. In the event, their dramas were, for the most part, little more than elaborated lyrics thrown arbitrarily into an inert dramatic form. That is to say, lacking the theatre, and the formative influence of the theatre, the objective quality which is the first essential of drama never came into full play at all. Shakespeare, as I suggested above, was a skilled playwright because he had this objective faculty in a measure only equalled, perhaps, by Homer, and a great playwright because he impregnated it with a subjective sense of equal supremacy. But, whereas it needs a subjective sense to make a great drama, drama of sorts can come to a kind of life in the theatre through the objective faculty alone, while without the objective faculty you cannot have drama which will hold the stage at all. And it was the opportunity to develop that objective sense in dramatic terms that was denied the poetic genius of the Victorian age, as it had been denied the poetic genius since the passing of the Restoration comedies. So that anything that is worth saying about the drama of the Victorian poets will be covered by the consideration of their poetry in general, and we may dismiss the specifically dramatic intention in it.