By the time the Victorian masters were beginning to write, the English language, in the common use of it, had thus gone through many adventures. Shaping itself to the typical or representative national temper and aspirations from one age to another, it had been dominantly in succession naïf, lusty, sacramental, witty and didactic, high-flown in its excesses, and then learned and argumentative with a leaven of yeoman correction in it under Wordsworth’s control. These characteristics had in turn passed into the texture of English poetry, and each had left something of its mark upon the future practice of the art, complicating it and making it more and more subject to a conscious literary deliberation. And now the example of Byron, with his cosmopolitan and sometimes journalistic use of language, of Keats with his intense brooding upon and requickening of an antique mode, of Shelley with his almost fanatical demands upon the spiritual resources of words, had further extended the range of poetic diction and at the same time increased the difficulties in the way of original mastery. These problems may seem to be artificial as here stated, and in a sense they are so. Poetry is neither more nor less difficult at one time than another, given the poet. But in the light of achievement we may not unprofitably consider what are the conditions that have governed that achievement from age to age, and so perhaps at least correct some of the false and easy notions that we are apt to foster about the art of our own time, when we approach it unset in its right historical perspective. Tennyson and Browning and Arnold and the Rossettis and Morris and Swinburne give us the delight of experience perfectly expressed, and that is the first, and in a way the last, thing to be said about them as poets. But, coming when they did, they were confronted with special problems in the practice of their art, and we lose nothing of our enjoyment of their essential poetry in understanding what those problems were.

English poetry was now nearly five hundred years old. In its creation immense demands had been made upon the language, and many characteristic beauties of poetic style might well have been supposed to have been now explored beyond further possibilities. When Chaucer wrote, the inspiration as of divinely wise and happy childhood could shine through the most ingenuous of phrases, and the plainest statement was touched by magic for ever in this playground of poetry’s infancy. “O yonge fresshe folkes,” he exclaims, or “Now shippes sailinge in the sea,” or “A nightingale, upon a cedre grene,” or “Ther sprang the violete all newe,” and we have with every word the enchanted discovery of poetry. Thereafter a poet might score a great effect now and again by placing some such utter simplicity in the midst of subtler or more elaborate statement, but it could hardly again be used as a customary manner. What was then and has ever since remained triumphantly original in Chaucer could but become commonplace on repetition. His way of saying delightedly that the flowers were fresh and the birds were glad and that apples were sweet, and saying these things just as simply as that, stands beside his humorous invention of character as one of the two chief glories of his poetry, but it was not a case of his faintly suggesting a poetic possibility that could be elaborated by his successors. He took the obvious and without embroidering it with a single word made it into poetry of everlasting freshness, but he did this once and for all, and poets after him would have to add some touch of revelation of their own before they could make good their claim. Chaucer could say that flowers were fresh and leave it at that, giving us a perfect image of spring, but even two hundred years later, in what now seems to us to have been still the dawn of English poetry, Shakespeare had to make his impression with a far more complex image—

By the time that Tennyson began to write, Shakespeare’s necessity was even plainer. The thousand simple circumstances of nature and humanity were still an inevitable part of the poet’s content matter. In the course of a lifework of artistic creation he could not but want to say a dozen times that the grass was green and the sky blue, the water clear and love uncertain, and it is merely pointless to forbid him these things because they have been said before. But apart from that allowance of an occasional cliché, admitted because of some virtue as contrast, as for example when Tennyson says—

he had to say these things with just as much originality of phrase as would compel attention, and yet with not one word beyond this, or one word too heavily weighted, lest he should be accused of inflation, which is the death of poetry.

A second difficulty that Tennyson, to use the one example for the moment, had to meet was in connection with the associative value of words. When Chaucer was writing, words can have had little or no associative value.[2] Even with Shakespeare they must have had far less of this evocative power than they had three hundred years later. Indeed, Shakespeare’s own language has unquestionably for us acquired a certain patina from time. We read to-day—

and upon analysis we are aware of two separate sources of our delight in the superbly used word “sessions.” Firstly, there is its purely imaginative value. For Shakespeare, “sessions” can have had but one literal meaning. In the framing of that line the common marvel of creative imagination was performed. The poet deliberated upon his thoughts gathering together for the survey of “things past.” It was a process something formal and ceremonious that he had in mind, a solemn conclave. Thus the ritual of the law would suggest itself to him, the ordered gravity of a court, the pregnant occasion of a sessions. And thereupon the two ideas would associate themselves, the perfect image would be created, and with it would come the full exercise of our imaginative powers in turn, of our best delight in poetry. For the bare actual setting of the scene in his sonnet Shakespeare might have been content with some such line as—

but the informing vitality would have escaped. It is one of the mysteries of poetry that when you translate her word into another, although by logic it may seem to be the same thing, it is in truth something essentially different. It is not quite a barren truism to say that you can only say what Shakespeare said by saying what he said—

This, then, is the first value that we discover in Shakespeare’s use in that connection of the word “sessions”—an exact functioning of the poetic imagination. But over and above that there is yet another value, one that is not very easy to define in set terms, and one of which Shakespeare himself can hardly have been consciously aware. “Sessions,” as we now read the word, calls to our mind, as it did to his, a court of law with all its weighty circumstance; also, as we read it in the sonnet, we get precisely the effect of pure imaginative effort that Shakespeare got, or as much of it as is possible to our own faculty; but the word has also taken on a strange atmospheric significance, almost a shade of actual meaning that is beyond its original intention. In its strictly imaginative value alone, the word was one that might without offence have been more or less similarly used by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries or early successors, even after his brilliant discovery of it in that context. Shakespeare’s choice of the word was entirely admirable for his imaginative purpose, but it was not so astonishing as to make it explicitly his own beyond the use of any other poet who wished to escape the charge of mere theft. But as time went on, the word, fixed there in its sonnet, underwent a spiritual evolution, that for practical purposes was complete in any case by the time Tennyson arrived, until it was in some sense of a newly acquired nature, and no longer safe for any poet’s handling. The word could not now be used in anything approaching the same context without calling up in the reader’s mind the whole dark and passionate background of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It has, in short, acquired a specifically literary association which is to say—although some critics would seem to overlook the fact—that it is the living witness of one of the supreme moments of human experience, but also that it has become so essential a part of that particular moment that it is now almost impossible to use it in the service of any other. And when Tennyson began to write he found a language that was strewn with words that had put on this dangerous nature, beautiful and often as it would appear irreplaceable words, yet now with calamity in their touch for the poet. To reject them was by no means the same thing as rejecting the false “poetic” inflation that had been the mark of Wordsworth’s attack. It meant that by now a new discipline of a very arduous and vigilant kind had become necessary in the practice of poetry. On every hand were admirable and seductive instruments the use of which was forbidden. If you were Keats you might privateer among the old poetry with profit, but his success in this matter was the adventure of lucky genius, not an example to be followed. Shakespeare could write

and Keats could find his Autumn sleeping

and be justified of his borrowing, but the exile from poetry of “drowsing” and “poppies” in company, which had at least been suggested by Shakespeare’s lines, was now in any case absolute. So that the poet’s craft is already complicated in two ways. If Tennyson in his verse wanted to recall the birds in spring, he could no longer rely for his effect upon some simple statement such as “the happy birds sang on the bough,” and further, in his elaborated image he had studiously to keep clear, for example, of

although the chances were that this superb and complex image would be insinuatingly persistent in his mind.

But these were not the only difficulties to be met in the management of diction. I have referred to Byron’s occasional “journalistic use of language.” Every now and again some one raises a false issue as between journalism and literature, suggesting that literature is arrogant in looking upon journalism as being less exalted than itself. It is the same kind of silly baiting as is sometimes indulged in between actors and dramatists, when it is indignantly suggested that it is an affront to the admirable art of Burbage to hold that it is, if the comparison must be made, on a lower creative plane than that of Shakespeare. Journalism, decently practised, can be as honourable and useful a profession as any other, and one to show natural gifts of taste and presentation to great advantage. But journalism is not literature, nor are its aims or methods those of literature. That literature often appears in the journals is beside the point. The essential condition of journalism is that it seeks either to report a fact or an event in terms that shall be immediately intelligible to the great mass of people, or to reflect an opinion from that mass in equally intelligible terms for the satisfaction of the individual units that make up that mass. Its business particularly is to accept and to report, and when it uses invention—which it must be allowed it often does—it is always invention of the wrong kind. To literature, on the other hand, fact and event mean nothing until they are related to an idea, or are seen in conjunction with character, or found to be useful for illuminating the experience of a particular temperament, and further, in precise contrast to journalism, literature seeks to reflect an individual opinion for the benefit or pleasure of the mass so far as the mass cares to take any notice of it. Thus “James Jones, a casual labourer, was yesterday convicted at the Clerkenwell Sessions of stealing a cigarette box, the property of Mr. Thomas Jackson, M. P., and was sentenced to one month’s hard labour” is journalism, while Mr. Galsworthy’s Silver Box is literature. Again, “To-day we celebrate the tercentenary of the death of one of the greatest of all Englishmen. We have sometimes been called a nation of shopkeepers, and yet no country is richer in her poets than England, and of these the acknowledged chief is William Shakespeare. Here was one who sounded the full gamut of human passions, and the universality of his genius has carried his fame into every quarter of the civilised globe. We honour not only Shakespeare, but ourselves in drinking to-day to the immortal memory of one whose work will endure as long as the English language is spoken”—is an example of journalism at its idlest, while Ben Jonson’s panegyric and Arnold’s sonnet, separated by two hundred and fifty years, are alike literature.

The flood of this journalism, considerable in Tennyson’s time and almost devastating in our own, has added seriously to the poet’s difficulties in the use of language. Whole tracts of English have been turned over to the service of this business of conveying useless information to people who are no whit the better for receiving it, or of giving an appearance of independent profundity to rough and ready mass opinion. The language has in consequence become so infested with clichés that a whole school of writers has arisen whose sole ambition would seem to be an ostentatious avoidance of these. Byron, the first great English poet to allow a humorous-ironic strain to run through the body of his serious poetry, as apart from professed satire, frequently made effective use of this journalistic quality in language, and the practice has been a common one with explicitly comic writers in verse ever since. But in doing this Byron exploited the growing activities of the Press very happily to his own purposes, without in any way enlarging the range of expression for poetry’s normal habit. The success of his license, indeed, made the conditions of diction even more exacting for his successors, since the journalistic cliché once dignified by literary usage was more definitely than ever ruled out as a poetic instrument. Fortune had rewarded the brave once, but the second comer could only expect to be dubbed foolhardy. After Byron, poetry had to remind herself that to relate her diction to the common idiomatic speech of her time and to relate it to the sophisticated periods of the leading article or the heavy facetiousness of the debating room were quite different things. She had to be careful not to be beguiled into doing seriously what Byron had done brilliantly with his tongue in his cheek. She had brought off a very good joke out of motley once, but that was enough; henceforth it must be played, when at all, in full view with cap and bells complete. The improviser had for once become the seer by some caprice of inspiration, and poetry would be wise to leave it at that.[3]

Finally, Tennyson found a language that as a literary vehicle was nearly five hundred years old, three hundred at least of which had been of rich and unceasing activity. This fact presented a difficulty distinct from that which has been examined in connection with Shakespeare’s use of the word “sessions.” Not only had particular words acquired a specific associative value which made them dangerous for use again in poetry, but the whole construction of a poetic phrase was now beset by mazes of seductive suggestion, word calling up word in long sequence from the vast stores of poetry that had been accumulated by the race. It was no longer a very easy thing to see the object before you, precisely in its immediate appearance, wholly dissociated from any company that it might have kept in some earlier creative presentation. It needed something of a conscious effort in looking at yellow sands to remind yourself that coral was not necessarily somewhere about, to remember that an albatross was not positively doomed to meet its death from a cross-bow, to hear the nightingale without hearing also the undertones of “tears amid the alien corn,” to see a country graveyard wholly unshadowed by the ghosts of village Hampdens and mute inglorious Miltons. There was no simple way of escape for the poet from this storied experience of his ancestry. He had to face it courageously like the rest of experience, to assimilate and master it, and in so far as it passed into his work at all, as it was bound to do in some measure, to stamp it with his own pressure and so recreate it. But it did complicate his task. We may now see how Tennyson dealt with this and the other problems that have been presented.