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A History of English Literature

R >> Robert Huntington Fletcher >> A History of English Literature




As a poet Arnold is generally admitted to rank among the Victorians next
after Tennyson and Browning. The criticism, partly true, that he was not
designed by Nature to be a poet but made himself one by hard work rests on
his intensely, and at the outset coldly, intellectual and moral
temperament. He himself, in modified Puritan spirit, defined poetry as a
criticism of life; his mind was philosophic; and in his own verse, inspired
by Greek poetry, by Goethe and Wordsworth, he realized his definition. In
his work, therefore, delicate melody and sensuous beauty were at first much
less conspicuous than a high moral sense, though after the first the
elements of external beauty greatly developed, often to the finest effect.
In form and spirit his poetry is one of the very best later reflections of
that of Greece, dominated by thought, dignified, and polished with the
utmost care. 'Sohrab and Rustum,' his most ambitious and greatest single
poem, is a very close and admirable imitation of 'The Iliad.' Yet, as the
almost intolerable pathos of 'Sohrab and Rustum' witnesses, Arnold is not
by any means deficient, any more than the Greek poets were, in emotion. He
affords, in fact, a striking example of classical form and spirit united
with the deep, self-conscious, meditative feeling of modern Romanticism.

In substance Arnold's poetry is the expression of his long and tragic
spiritual struggle. To him religion, understood as a reverent devotion to
Divine things, was the most important element in life, and his love of pure
truth was absolute; but he held that modern knowledge had entirely
disproved the whole dogmatic and doctrinal scheme of historic Christianity
and that a new spiritual revelation was necessary. To his Romantic nature,
however, mere knowledge and mere modern science, which their followers were
so confidently exalting, appeared by no means adequate to the purpose;
rather they seemed to him largely futile, because they did not stimulate
the emotions and so minister to the spiritual life. Further, the restless
stirrings of his age, beginning to arouse itself from the social lethargy
of centuries, appeared to him pitifully unintelligent and devoid of
results. He found all modern life, as he says in 'The Scholar-Gypsy,' a
'strange disease,' in which men hurry wildly about in a mad activity which
they mistake for achievement. In Romantic melancholy he looked wistfully
back by contrast to periods when 'life was fresh and young' and could
express itself vigorously and with no torturing introspection. The
exaggerated pessimism in this part of his outcry is explained by his own
statement, that he lived in a transition time, when the old faith was (as
he held) dead, and the new one (partly realized in our own generation) as
yet 'powerless to be born.' Arnold's poetry, therefore, is to be viewed as
largely the expression, monotonous but often poignantly beautiful, of a
temporary mood of questioning protest. But if his conclusion is not
positive, it is at least not weakly despairing. Each man, he insists,
should diligently preserve and guard in intellectual and moral integrity
the fortress of his own soul, into which, when necessary, he can retire in
serene and stoical resignation, determined to endure and to 'see life
steadily and see it whole.' Unless the man himself proves traitor, the
littlenesses of life are powerless to conquer him. In fact, the invincible
courage of the thoroughly disciplined spirit in the midst of doubt and
external discouragement has never been, more nobly expressed than by Arnold
in such poems as 'Palladium' and (from a different point of view) 'The Last
Word.'

There is a striking contrast (largely expressing an actual change of spirit
and point of view) between the manner of Arnold's poetry and that of his
prose. In the latter he entirely abandons the querulous note and assumes
instead a tone of easy assurance, jaunty and delightfully satirical.
Increasing maturity had taught him that merely to sit regarding the past
was useless and that he himself had a definite doctrine, worthy of being
preached with all aggressiveness. We have already said that his essays fall
into four classes, literary, social, religious, and political, though they
cannot always be sharply distinguished. As a literary critic he is uneven,
and, as elsewhere, sometimes superficial, but his fine appreciation and
generally clear vision make him refreshingly stimulating. His point of view
is unusually broad, his chief general purpose being to free English taste
from its insularity, to give it sympathetic acquaintance with the peculiar
excellences of other literatures. Some of his essays, like those on 'The
Function of Criticism at the Present Time,' 'Wordsworth,' and 'Byron,' are
among the best in English, while his 'Essays on Translating Homer' present
the most famous existing interpretation of the spirit and style of the
great Greek epics.

In his social essays, of which the most important form the volume entitled
'Culture and Anarchy,' he continues in his own way the attacks of Carlyle
and Ruskin. Contemporary English life seems to him a moral chaos of
physical misery and of the selfish, unenlightened, violent expression of
untrained wills. He too looks with pitying contempt on the material
achievements of science and the Liberal party as being mere 'machinery,'
means to an end, which men mistakenly worship as though it possessed a real
value in itself. He divides English society into three classes: 1. The
Aristocracy, whom he nick-names 'The Barbarians,' because, like the
Germanic tribes who overthrew the Roman Empire, they vigorously assert
their own privileges and live in the external life rather than in the life
of the spirit. 2. The Middle Class, which includes the bulk of the nation.
For them he borrows from German criticism the name 'Philistines,' enemies
of the chosen people, and he finds their prevailing traits to be
intellectual and spiritual narrowness and a fatal and superficial
satisfaction with mere activity and material prosperity. 3. 'The Populace,'
the 'vast raw and half-developed residuum.' For them Arnold had sincere
theoretical sympathy (though his temperament made it impossible for him to
enter into the same sort of personal sympathy with them as did Ruskin); but
their whole environment and conception of life seemed to him hideous. With
his usual uncomplimentary frankness Arnold summarily described the three
groups as 'a materialized upper class, a vulgarized middle class, and a
brutalized lower class.'

For the cure of these evils Arnold's proposed remedy was Culture, which he
defined as a knowledge of the best that has been thought and done in the
world and a desire to make the best ideas prevail. Evidently this Culture
is not a mere knowledge of books, unrelated to the rest of life. It has
indeed for its basis a very wide range of knowledge, acquired by
intellectual processes, but this knowledge alone Arnold readily admitted to
be 'machinery.' The real purpose and main part of Culture is the training,
broadening, and refining of the whole spirit, including the emotions as
well as the intellect, into sympathy with all the highest ideals, and
therefore into inward peace and satisfaction. Thus Culture is not
indolently selfish, but is forever exerting itself to 'make the best
ideas'--which Arnold also defined as 'reason and the will, of
God'--'prevail.'

Arnold felt strongly that a main obstacle to Culture was religious
narrowness. He held that the English people had been too much occupied with
the 'Hebraic' ideal of the Old Testament, the interest in morality or right
conduct, and though he agreed that this properly makes three quarters of
life, he insisted that it should be joined with the Hellenic (Greek) ideal
of a perfectly rounded nature. He found the essence of Hellenism expressed
in a phrase which he took from Swift, 'Sweetness and Light,' interpreting
Sweetness to mean the love of Beauty, material and spiritual, and Light,
unbiased intelligence; and he urged that these forces be allowed to have
the freest play. He vigorously attacked the Dissenting denominations,
because he believed them to be a conspicuous embodiment of Philistine lack
of Sweetness and Light, with an unlovely insistence on unimportant external
details and a fatal blindness to the meaning of real beauty and real
spirituality. Though he himself was without a theological creed, he was,
and held that every Englishman should be, a devoted adherent of the English
Church, as a beautiful, dignified, and national expression of essential
religion, and therefore a very important influence for Culture.

Toward democracy Arnold took, not Carlyle's attitude of definite
opposition, but one of questioning scrutiny. He found that one actual
tendency of modern democracy was to 'let people do as they liked,' which,
given the crude violence of the Populace, naturally resulted in lawlessness
and therefore threatened anarchy. Culture, on the other hand, includes the
strict discipline of the will and the sacrifice of one's own impulses for
the good of all, which means respect for Law and devotion to the State.
Existing democracy, therefore, he attacked with unsparing irony, but he did
not condemn its principle. One critic has said that 'his ideal of a State
can best be described as an Educated Democracy, working by Collectivism in
Government, Religion and Social Order.' But in his own writings he scarcely
gives expression to so definite a conception.

Arnold's doctrine, of course, was not perfectly comprehensive nor free from
prejudices; but none could be essentially more useful for his generation or
ours. We may readily grant that it is, in one sense or another, a doctrine
for chosen spirits, but if history makes anything clear it is that chosen
spirits are the necessary instruments of all progress and therefore the
chief hope of society.

The differences between Arnold's teaching and that of his two great
contemporaries are probably now clear. All three are occupied with the
pressing necessity of regenerating society. Carlyle would accomplish this
end by means of great individual characters inspired by confidence in the
spiritual life and dominating their times by moral strength; Ruskin would
accomplish it by humanizing social conditions and spiritualizing and
refining all men's natures through devotion to the principles of moral
Right and esthetic Beauty; Arnold would leaven the crude mass of society,
so far as possible, by permeating it with all the myriad influences of
spiritual, moral, and esthetic culture. All three, of course, like every
enlightened reformer, are aiming at ideal conditions which can be actually
realized only in the distant future.

Arnold's style is one of the most charming features of his work. Clear,
direct, and elegant, it reflects most attractively his own high breeding;
but it is also eminently forceful, and marked by very skilful emphasis and
reiteration. One of his favorite devices is a pretense of great humility,
which is only a shelter from which he shoots forth incessant and pitiless
volleys of ironical raillery, light and innocent in appearance, but
irresistible in aim and penetrating power. He has none of the gorgeousness
of Ruskin or the titanic strength of Carlyle, but he can be finely
eloquent, and he is certainly one of the masters of polished effectiveness.

ALFRED TENNYSON. In poetry, apart from the drama, the Victorian period is
the greatest in English literature. Its most representative, though not its
greatest, poet is Alfred Tennyson. Tennyson, the fourth of a large family
of children, was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, in 1809. That year, as it
happened, is distinguished by the birth of a large number of eminent men,
among them Gladstone, Darwin, and Lincoln. Tennyson's father was a
clergyman, holding his appointments from a member of the landed gentry; his
mother was peculiarly gentle and benevolent. From childhood the poet,
though physically strong, was moody and given to solitary dreaming; from
early childhood also he composed poetry, and when he was seventeen he and
one of his elder brothers brought out a volume of verse, immature, but of
distinct poetic feeling and promise. The next year they entered Trinity
College, Cambridge, where Tennyson, too reserved for public prominence,
nevertheless developed greatly through association with a gifted group of
students. Called home by the fatal illness of his father shortly before his
four year's were completed, he decided, as Milton had done, and as Browning
was even then doing, to devote himself to his art; but, like Milton, he
equipped himself, now and throughout his life, by hard and systematic study
of many of the chief branches of knowledge, including the sciences. His
next twenty years were filled with difficulty and sorrow. Two volumes of
poems which he published in 1830 and 1832 were greeted by the critics with
their usual harshness, which deeply wounded his sensitive spirit and
checked his further publication for ten years; though the second of these
volumes contains some pieces which, in their later, revised, form, are
among his chief lyric triumphs. In 1833 his warm friend Arthur Hallam, a
young man of extraordinary promise, who was engaged, moreover, to one of
Tennyson's sisters, died suddenly without warning. Tennyson's grief, at
first overwhelming, was long a main factor in his life and during many
years found slow artistic expression in 'In Memoriam' and other poems. A
few years later came another deep sorrow. Tennyson formed an engagement of
marriage with Miss Emily Sellwood, but his lack of worldly prospects led
her relatives to cancel it.

Tennyson now spent much of his time in London, on terms of friendship with
many literary men, including Carlyle, who almost made an exception in his
favor from his general fanatical contempt for poetry. In 1842 Tennyson
published two volumes of poems, including the earlier ones revised; he here
won an undoubted popular success and was accepted by the best judges as the
chief living productive English poet. Disaster followed in the shape of an
unfortunate financial venture which for a time reduced his family to
serious straits and drove him with shattered nerves to a sanitarium. Soon,
however, he received from the government as a recognition of his poetic
achievement a permanent annual pension of two hundred pounds, and in 1847
he published the strange but delightful 'Princess.' The year 1850 marked
the decisive turning point of his career. He was enabled to renew his
engagement and be married; the publication of 'In Memoriam' established him
permanently in a position of such popularity as few living poets have ever
enjoyed; and on the death of Wordsworth he was appointed Poet Laureate.

The prosperity of the remaining half of his life was a full recompense for
his earlier struggles, though it is marked by few notable external events.
Always a lover of the sea, he soon took up his residence in the Isle of
Wight. His production of poetry was steady, and its variety great. The
largest of all his single achievements was the famous series of 'Idylls of
the King,' which formed a part of his occupation for many years. In much of
his later work there is a marked change from his earlier elaborate
decorativeness to a style of vigorous strength. At the age of sixty-five,
fearful that he had not yet done enough to insure his fame, he gave a
remarkable demonstration of poetic vitality by striking out into the to him
new field of poetic drama. His important works here are the three tragedies
in which he aimed to complete the series of Shakspere's chronicle-history
plays; but he lacked the power of dramatic action, and the result is rather
three fine poems than successful plays. In 1883, after having twice refused
a baronetcy, he, to the regret of his more democratic friends, accepted a
peerage (barony). Tennyson disliked external show, but he was always
intensely loyal to the institutions of England, he felt that literature was
being honored in his person, and he was willing to secure a position of
honor for his son, who had long rendered him devoted service. He died
quietly in 1892, at the age of eighty-three, and was buried in Westminster
Abbey beside Browning, who had found a resting-place there three years
earlier. His personal character, despite some youthful morbidness, was
unusually delightful, marked by courage, honesty, sympathy, and
straightforward manliness. He had a fine voice and took undisguised
pleasure in reading his poems aloud. The chief traits of his poetry in form
and substance may be suggested in a brief summary.

1. Most characteristic, perhaps, is his exquisite artistry (in which he
learned much from Keats). His appreciation for sensuous beauty, especially
color, is acute; his command of poetic phraseology is unsurpassed; he
suggests shades of, feeling and elusive aspiration with, marvelously
subtile power; his descriptions are magnificently beautiful, often with
much detail; and his melody is often the perfection of sweetness. Add the
truth and tenderness of his emotion, and it results that he is one of the
finest and most moving of lyric poets. Nor is all this beauty vague and
unsubstantial. Not only was he the most careful of English poets, revising
his works with almost unprecedented pains, but his scientific habit of mind
insists on the greatest accuracy; in his allusions to Nature he often
introduces scientific facts in a way thitherto unparalleled, and sometimes
even only doubtfully poetic. The influence of the classic literatures on
his style and expression was great; no poet combines more harmoniously
classic perfection and romantic feeling.

2. The variety of his poetic forms is probably greater than that of any
other English poet. In summary catalogue may be named: lyrics, both
delicate and stirring; ballads; romantic dreams and fancies; descriptive
poems; sentimental reveries, and idyls; long narratives, in which he
displays perfect narrative skill; delightfully realistic
character-sketches, some of them in dialect; dramas; and meditative poems,
long and short, on religious, ethical, and social questions. In almost all
these forms he has produced numerous masterpieces.

3. His chief deficiency is in the dramatic quality. No one can present more
finely than he moods (often carefully set in a harmoniously appropriate
background of external nature) or characters in stationary position; and
there is splendid spirit in his narrative passages of vigorous action.
Nevertheless his genius and the atmosphere of his poems are generally
dreamy, romantic, and aloof from actual life. A brilliant critic [Footnote:
Professor Lewis E. Gates in a notable essay, 'Studies and Appreciations,'
p. 71.] has caustically observed that he 'withdraws from the turmoil of the
real universe into the fortress of his own mind, and beats the enemy in toy
battles with toy soldiers.' He never succeeded in presenting to the
satisfaction of most good critics a vigorous man in vigorous action.

4. The ideas of his poetry are noble and on the whole clear. He was an
independent thinker, though not an innovator, a conservative liberal, and
was so widely popular because he expressed in frank but reverent fashion
the moderately advanced convictions of his time. His social ideals, in
which he is intensely interested, are those of Victorian humanitarianism.
He hopes ardently for a steady amelioration of the condition of the masses,
proceeding toward a time when all men shall have real opportunity for full
development; and freedom is one of his chief watchwords. But with typical
English conservatism he believes that progress must be gradual, and that it
should be controlled by order, loyalty, and reverence. Like a true
Englishman, also, he is sure that the institutions of England are the best
in the world, so that he is a strong supporter of the monarchy and the
hereditary aristocracy. In religion, his inherited belief, rooted in his
deepest fibers, early found itself confronted by the discoveries of modern
science, which at first seemed to him to proclaim that the universe is much
what it seemed to the young Carlyle, a remorseless monster, 'red in tooth
and claw,' scarcely thinkable as the work of a Christian God who cares for
man. Tennyson was too sincere to evade the issue, and after years of inner
struggle he arrived at a positive faith in the central principles of
Christianity, broadly interpreted, though it was avowedly a faith based on
instinct and emotional need rather than on unassailable reasoning. His
somewhat timid disposition, moreover, never allowed him to enunciate his
conclusions with anything like the buoyant aggressiveness of his
contemporary, Robert Browning. How greatly science had influenced his point
of view appears in the conception which is central in his later poetry,
namely that the forces of the universe are governed by unchanging Law,
through which God works. The best final expression of his spirit is the
lyric 'Crossing the Bar,' which every one knows and which at his own
request is printed last in all editions of his works.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNING. Robert Browning, Tennyson's
chief poetic contemporary, stands in striking artistic contrast to
Tennyson--a contrast which perhaps serves to enhance the reputation of
both. Browning's life, if not his poetry, must naturally be considered in
connection with that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with whom he was united
in what appears the most ideal marriage of two important writers in the
history of literature.

Elizabeth Barrett, the daughter of a country gentleman of Herefordshire
(the region of the Malvern Hills and of 'Piers Plowman'), was born in 1806.
She was naturally both healthy and intellectually precocious; the writing
of verse and outdoor life divided all her early life, and at seventeen she
published, a volume of immature poems. At fifteen, however, her health was
impaired by an accident which happened as she was saddling her pony, and at
thirty, after a removal of the family to London, it completely failed. From
that time on for ten years she was an invalid, confined often to her bed
and generally to her chamber, sometimes apparently at the point of death.
Nevertheless she kept on with persistent courage and energy at her study
and writing. The appearance of her poems in two volumes in 1844 gave her a
place among the chief living poets and led to her acquaintance with
Browning.

Browning was born in a London suburb in 1812 (the same year with Dickens),
of very mixed ancestry, which may partly explain the very diverse traits in
his nature and poetry. His father, a man of artistic and cultured tastes,
held a subordinate though honorable position in the Bank of England. The
son inherited a strong instinct for all the fine arts, and though he
composed verses before he could write, seemed for years more likely to
become a musician than a poet. His formal schooling was irregular, but he
early began to acquire from his father's large and strangely-assorted
library the vast fund of information which astonishes the reader of his
poetry, and he too lived a healthy out-of-door life. His parents being
Dissenters, the universities were not open to him, and when he was
seventeen his father somewhat reluctantly consented to his own unhesitating
choice of poetry as a profession. For seventeen years more he continued in
his father's home, living a normal life among his friends, writing
continuously, and gradually acquiring a reputation among some good critics,
but making very little impression on the public. Some of his best short
poems date from these years, such as 'My Last Duchess' and 'The Bishop
Orders His Tomb'; but his chief effort went into a series of seven or eight
poetic dramas, of which 'Pippa Passes' is best known and least dramatic.
They are noble poetry, but display in marked degree the psychological
subtilety which in part of his poetry demands unusually close attention
from the reader.

In one of the pieces in her volumes of 1844 Elizabeth Barrett mentioned
Browning, among other poets, with generous praise. This led to a
correspondence between the two, and soon to a courtship, in which
Browning's earnestness finally overcame Miss Barrett's scrupulous
hesitation to lay upon him (as she felt) the burden of her invalidism.
Indeed her invalidism at last helped to turn the scales in Browning's
favor, for the physicians had declared that Miss Barrett's life depended on
removal to a warmer climate, but to this her father, a well-intentioned but
strangely selfish man, absolutely refused to consent. The record of the
courtship is given in Mrs. Browning's 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' (a
whimsical title, suggested by Mrs. Browning's childhood nickname, 'The
Little Portuguese'), which is one of the finest of English
sonnet-sequences. The marriage, necessarily clandestine, took place in
1846; Mrs. Browning's father thenceforth treated her as one dead, but the
removal from her morbid surroundings largely restored her health for the
remaining fifteen years of her life. During these fifteen years the two
poets resided chiefly in various cities of Italy, with a nominal home in
Florence, and Mrs. Browning had an inherited income which sufficed for
their support until their poetry became profitable. Their chief works
during this period were Mrs. Browning's 'Aurora Leigh' (1856), a long
'poetic novel' in blank verse dealing with the relative claims of Art and
Social Service and with woman's place in the world; and Browning's most
important single publication, his two volumes of 'Men and Women' (1855),
containing fifty poems, many of them among his very best.

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