This element in the management of the poetic function, which sometimes in Tennyson became a weakness, was one which left its traces upon the volume of Victorian poetry as a whole. It was, indeed, not a sudden phenomenon specifically of that age, since it had been gradually asserting itself in English poetry for some generations, but it now became for a considerable time an established part of the tradition. That is to say, the interests of poetry generally, although it was impossible for them to explore more deeply the fundamentals of human nature than had been done in the past, had by now become far more various in their operations than they had been. The great Victorian poets could achieve no more of significant revelation than Shakespeare and Milton and Wordsworth, but they did, as it happened, deal in their poetry with a wider range of interests. The actual subjects chosen by the Victorians for poetic treatment far exceeded in number the subjects that had been so chosen in any age before. One might put it crudely and say that Tennyson and Browning and Arnold, and some of the others, wrote about every subject under the sun. Tennyson is reported to have told a friend that he would have written the Ode in praise of Wellington, with all its political and imperial preoccupations, quite independently of the claims of his function as laureate. A Colonial Exhibition, the latest step in the theory of evolution, the progress of the feminist movement, a marriage in the royal family, these things could move his emotions with hardly less authenticity than the eternal exultations and desires that were for him, as they had been immemorially, the subject matter of poetry. When we remember what vast tracts of even that common ground had in different ages been left almost wholly unexplored by poetry, we realise more fully the catholicity of interest which now called it. The great age of the Elizabethan lyric, for example, hardly touched the resources of nature as material for poetry, while with the age of Pope love poetry passed with the last artificialities of the later Carolines into almost complete silence for a generation. And, again, for a period of over a hundred years, between the death of Vaughan and the coming of William Blake, the note of religious mysticism, with the exception of Christopher Smart’s one ecstatic moment, almost goes out of English poetry altogether. If, remembering these things, we then turn our minds to the Victorians, and have a sense of their poetic mood, we at once realise that it would have been almost inconceivable that any one of them should have failed in the course of his usual practice to write a great deal about all these things, nature and love and religion, and we find, in fact, that each one of them did so. But in going beyond these and kindred subjects, as they habitually did, to more specific and local interests for their inspiration, they became, in a sense that no group of masters had been before, occasional poets.

It was fortunate that they brought to their office as such the best of their qualities, and did not reserve these alone for the inspirations more accredited by tradition, so that occasional poetry, in the Victorian age, very often became great poetry. In reading the poetry of no other age do we so often feel that a poet of first-rate endowment has, as it were, been hunting about for a subject. Occasional poetry conceived and carried out in the great manner had hitherto been almost wholly confined to personal addresses of compliment or condolence, and fustian as these mostly were there had been very noble exceptions. But with the Victorians the occasions were unconfined, and any one of the poets might at any moment produce a memorable poem, as it seemed, upon something that might catch his eye in the morning paper. If, by way of illustration, we were to take the titles of a hundred of Donne’s poems and set them beside the titles of a hundred of Browning’s, we should find that in external range the one would be, as it were, a small green isle and the other a very archipelago. I need not labour the point that this does not at all suggest that Browning was a greater poet than Donne; it merely emphasises the fact that Browning’s age was far less concentrated in its poetic attentions than was Donne’s. The result of which was that Victorian poetry, with all its great central merits, all its loyal assertation of the eternal elements, acquired a certain scattered character, a certain disorder in bulk, that leaves the essential spirit of this age a little more than commonly difficult to come at.

A further result was that a good deal of Victorian work is of a lowered significance when set beside work of corresponding eminence in other ages. The moments of artistic surrender such as we find playing havoc with Tennyson’s poetry in such a passage as that given by Guinevere were not uncommon in the work of the age, though they often came in another and less disastrous aspect. The arbitrariness that so often governed—or left ungoverned—the Victorian choice of subject, could not but sometimes bring about a relation of something less than the highest imaginative urgency between the poet and the occasion of his verse. In the general run of poetic practice this did not necessarily mean an entire failure of the spirit nor a total absence of enchantment, but it did more often than not make the thing created seem to be less inevitably an addition to the riches of English poetry. A great deal of the work of so admirable a poet as Mrs. Browning, for example, is heavily marked by this condition. Setting aside her obvious but unimportant technical deficiencies, we find in reading one long piece of hers after another that it “hath all the good gifts of nature” except indisputable evidence of its original necessity. A poem such as An Island sparkles with tender and expressive imagery—

And yet the whole has something of the character of a despatch from a divinely gifted special correspondent. And the same thing may be said sometimes even of so spiritually immaculate a writer as Christina Rossetti. Goblin Market is a masterpiece, conceived out of a lovely nature and flawlessly executed, but if our minds go from it to Drayton or Herrick, with whom it has some affinity, we are aware not of a surer touch in the older poets but of a stricter visitation. Under the Rose, a triumph of delicately controlled power, has, very elusively here, the same suggestion of something occasional in its character. Perhaps the most notable instance of all is Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat,[20] and here we are on delicate ground, since we are speaking of not only one of the most celebrated poems of the age, but of one of the most remarkable. At first thought it might seem that of no poet could it less justifiably be said that in his principal lifework he was allowing any occasional or even any external influence to play upon his creative mood. Fastidious in judgment, of lonely intellectual pursuits, having not the slightest regard for contemporary fame, indolent rather than eager in creation and, far from seeking occasion for poetry, relieved when he could pass it by, as he generally could, and wholly unconscious of anything like a mission, FitzGerald might well have been the last poet in whom to look for the accidental quality of which we are speaking. And yet it is this accidental quality that keeps his Rubaiyat, so rich in memorable excellence, so splendidly contrived and so often universal in its nature, from being among the very greatest moral poems in the language. The circumstance that it took its form from FitzGerald’s Oriental studies and is Persian in its machinery is of no consequence; Shakespeare was equally Shakespeare in the Roman world and mediæval legend and his modern England, and as much might be said for Morris in FitzGerald’s own time. Here was a poem that was essentially religious in character—that its doctrine was one of agnostic hedonism notwithstanding. For such a poem to come to the highest achievement possible to its kind, the first indispensable condition is an uncompromising faith, and this is what Fitzgerald had not even in his own dolce far niente. There had once in English poetry been an age of faith, and there had once been an age of reason, but FitzGerald was of an age in which faith and reason were, in the life of the nation, for the moment inextricably confused, and when poetry addressed itself to rhapsodical belief—or unbelief if you will—as it did in the Rubaiyat, the seductions of reason were ever-present and the fervour of confession was embarrassed by the insinuations of argument. This did not much matter in In Memoriam or in the great part of Browning’s work that was religious in texture, because here speculation was, for good or ill, very largely the explicit province of the poetry. But FitzGerald’s design was not speculation, it was disclosure, and when this is so poetry should breathe the spirit of the labourer addressing his wife, “I’m not arguin’, I’m a-tellin’ of yer.” If the reader should think it worth while, for comparative purposes, to turn up a forgotten but splendid poem, Memorials of Mortality, by Joshua Sylvester,[21] he will find an admirable example of faith in somewhat lugubrious but trumpet-toned poetic assertion. There is no arguing in Sylvester, it is all rhetorical and solemn revelation, wholly indifferent to its audience and unconscious of the possibility of denial. With FitzGerald there is an undertone always of anxiety to carry opinion with him, very indefinite in expression and yet present clearly enough if our attention is close. We do not complain about it; to do so would be at once foolish and ungenerous. But we are aware of it and we know that it is in some subtle way, and perhaps unconsciously, a concession to a mood of the time, which, as we have seen, was a little antagonistic to the most commanding kind of poetic fulfilment. When we read—

we cannot but admire the masterly, indeed the unforgettable way in which the philosophic position is set forth, nor can we deny that the statement is fairly within the terms of poetry. But in such notes as this, which are frequent in the Rubaiyat, we detect a certain faltering in imaginative faith, not precisely in intellectual conviction about the creed which is being expounded, but in the spiritual exaltation that may lift any creed, whether it be sacramental and beatific as in Crashaw’s St. Theresa, or stoic as in Emily Brontë’s Last Lines, or inscrutably naturalistic as in Mr. Ralph Hodgson’s Song of Honour, above the regions of debate to the very pinnacle of authority. When all these reservations have been made, there is enough virtue and to spare in Victorian poetry to leave it written as a new and glorious chapter in the most national of our arts, nor can spiritual ecstasy itself be wholly denied it, as Dost Thou Not Care? and many other poems by Christina Rossetti, Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, Browning’s Prospice, and, dark though its conclusions be, Arnold’s Dover Beach, and Mrs. Browning’s Weeping Saviour, and Coventry Patmore’s Vesica Piscis, to name half a dozen poems at a venture, can testify. But, considering the manifestations of poetry in that age as a whole, spiritual ecstasy was one of its least constant achievements.