BOOKS.

THE STATE OF ENGLISH POETRY.*

THE current number of the Quarterly Review contains an article on the above subject, supplementary, as it would seem, to' one published at the beginning of last year, on the works of Swinburne and Morris. The present article touches on a greater variety of topics, but is marked by less moderation of view and less soundness of criticism. In fact, it contains so many observa- tions which we consider questionable, and is pervaded by more

than one opinion from which we so decidedly differ, that we think our readers will not be displeased to see a few remarks in answer to some of the positions taken up by the writer. Putting aside the references to minor poets, which are inconsiderable, the article is mainly devoted to an exposition of what the Reviewer considers faulty in matter or style in the works of Tennyson and Browning, as representatives of what have been called the "Idyllic" and the " Psychological" schools of Poetry. Before coming to points of disagreement, we may as well mention those few in which we are of one mind with the Reviewer. We have little or nothing to say against his criticism on the form of narrative which Mr. Browning has chosen for "The Ring and the Book," and we will not attempt any wholesale defence of more recent works by the same author. We think it must also be. conceded to him that many of the characters in Mr. Tennyson's- poems are wanting in individuality, though even here we should refer principally to the earlier ones, such as the lovers in the " Gardener's Daughter," in the " Miller's Daughter," and is " Locksley Hall," while the reviewer would include also the knightly figures in the "Idylls of the King."

In criticising the "Dramatis Personm " and " Men and Women," Mr. Browning's aim, the Reviewer says, appears to be " to repre- sent character apart from action, to reveal to the reader the actual life of the soul ;" that the poems in these two collections " resemble soliloquies extracted from dramas, to the earlier acts of which the- reader is supposed to have had private access." The critic seems- to be the victim of a phrase, and to imagine that because the subjects of the poems are called " Characters of the Drama," quit; the poetic shape in which they are exhibited ought to have involved a full dramatic treatment. This we think an illusion. Mr.. Browning has written plays—whether good or bad is not now the- question—and in them his notions of dramatic treatment are- exemplified. But the Reviewer, without, as we believe, any inten- tional want of candour, completely ignores this fact. The simplest view of the matterseems to be that when Mr. Browning had a complex group of characters to embody, he did so in a play; when he proposed to exhibit a single character, he endeavoured through study and imagination to pierce to the heart of that character, and thee embodied it in a concrete dramatic shape. The Reviewer's taunt that Mr. Browning's method assumes " that whatever he thinks concerning things and persons must be true" is beside the ques- tion. Every writer who forms a theory as to an historical

• Our Living Poets. By H. Button Forman. (Quarterly Bedew for July.) London: John Murray.

bucolic love are peculiar to a dry, fertile, and sunny exactly is this way in a regular drama, or that the poet's own climate but there is nothing in our damp island atmo- thoughts are necessarily represented by the violent language of sphere, or in our own character, to favour that easy, contented, alaud's lover. All that a poet—" dowered with the hate of hate, grasshopper life which still marks the peoples of the South." It the scorn of scorn, the love of love "—puts into the mouth of a is difficult to see that these images are not common to all climates, character is not to be criticised as if it were a deliberate expression still more to understand why, if climate has so much to do with of his general opinions.

pastoral poetry, Virgil should not have succeeded in it even better The question of the style of our modern poets is, however, the than Theocritus. The real reason why Virgil and many writers one to which the reviewer most frequently recurs, and it is that in since his time have failed in this line is because they allowed which he is inclined to bear hardest against Mr. Tennyson, as well their literary prepossessions and social or courtly sympathies to as against Mr. Rossetti and Mr. Woolner, in comparing them with draw them from the direct study of nature and humanity ; writers of the last generation. The gist of his criticism on this not because there was any difference in the subjects with which point is to be found in the following passage :- they were dealing. The literary prepossessions of his time were

an obstacle also to the Reviewer's favourite, Crabbe, whose stories fire has gone, and they do but cover the want of the inner glow by the are as much idylls as Tennyson's " Dora," but whose way of splendour of their language and verse. Poetry in the view of the writing is manifestly under undue subjection to the traditions of second great class of poets, whom we have called Artists, has come to the eighteenth century. Crabbe had not that delicate tact and be identical with the creation of Form. We are for over hearing the finish of style which would have enabled him to bring all the throughout his hook Mr. Forman speaks of the poet as an artist, classi- rough and prosaic parts of his narration up to the pitch of those fying him directly with the painter, the musician, and the sculptor, as which describe human feeling. His verse wants ease, and not if the other arts wore precisely the same as the poet's in their nature seldom intelligibility, in parts where these qualities are peculiarly and function. Phrases and theories of this kind all point to the spread required for the transitions of the story. He was, in fact, hampered the expense of thought. Look where wo may-, wo find little besides by his metre, and it does not appear to have occurred to him that word-painting, alliteration, the revival of old forms, the construction of blank verse was susceptible of such improvement as would fit it to now metres, and it seems to bo generally believed that any thought, be the vehicle of an interesting modern story. Now this is exactly Tho ambition of every poet is, not to express a good thought in the the task which Mr. Tennyson has performed, and fully agreeing most appropriate manner, but to put a thought into such a curious with the Reviewer that our present blank verse is his creation, we form of words as no poet has conceived before."

bold that in the establishment of a style so capable of dealing with He proceeds to say that the " individuality " of the modern poet all subjects, from the most familiar to the most elevated, of which is not the sign of vigour, but of corruption ; that the purity of

poetry can treat, he has deserved well of English literature. English has been vitiated by " curiosities of language ;" and that In introducing the question of mannerism, the Reviewer attributes there is too much " ignorant depreciation " of the poetry of the last to the "Idyllic School" " an attempt to confound the represen- century. Though on page 6 he tells us that he is " far from desiring tation ' of poetry with the ' representation' of painting," and to confine the imagination of the poet to contemporary subjects," talks of the " pursuance of this design" as having had a bad and willkindly allow him " anthropophagi" and " dragons," he here influence on its use of language. This notion of " attempt " complains that our poets seek to reflect for us the feeling of every and " design," we think, is an eidolon of the Reviewer's age except our own, " that it is useless to try and recover the little own brain. Mr. Tennyson and his beat disciples have the middle ages have left to ua (!), and declares finally that if poetry done all they could ; not perhaps all they have wished to do. is to live, we must have a poetry reflecting our own life and That the former ever wilfully postponed the exhibition of human thought." He goes on to condemn the prejudice—which he con- character must make this assumption, whatever shape he may life and character to merely picturesque externals is an absurdity give to his conception. Whether he exhibits his characters acting on the face of it. It is quite another thing to say that his genius so as to reveal their characters, or whether he makes them say is picturesque rather than dramatic, and that pathos or any other what their inmost thoughts are, is of little consequence. The feeling must assume a picturesque form in his imagination before Reviewer also seems to think it a hardship that the whole story is he can bring himself to embody it in words. He is absolutely not plainly told,—for instance, that we are assumed to know that right and true in all points which depend on his observation of Andrea del Sarto had a bad wife. Why is this more a hardship nature—as right as Wordsworth, though he usually deals with than our being supposed to know the same thing of Samson at the visible phenomena of a less purely natural kind—but in points opening of the " Agonistes "? On reading every poem of this which involve the workings of human character he is less impres- kind in the collections referred to, we can but ask ourselves.—Is sive. The Reviewer mentions " Enoch Arden" as "natural and this a probable solution of the difficulties of the character ? Does well constructed," and speaks of " Laodamia" as if of a poem of it throw any light on it which we could not find in a biography ? unquestioned excellence. He does not apparently perceive what has Are the insight and imagination of the poet any aid to us in con- always seemed to us a grave fault in the former poem. We mean ceiving the man as a life-like whole ? Or, to take those poems the abstention of Enoch from claiming his wife on his return, corn- which have no positive historic basis, do they help us to any bined with the death-bed revelation of his identity. It could not striking picture of human emotion, any novel phase of human possibly answer any good end that his widow should ever after be character, or even to any picture of the genre kind which shows saddened by the thought that he had been living at her door, a us human nature in its typical rather than its individual aspect ? miserable, broken man, for so many happy years of her second For instances of all these we may refer to " Porphyria's Lover," marriage. Nor is he alive to the defects of " Laodamia," in which " The Statue and the Bust," " Up in a Villa and Down in the the character of the heroine is conceived under an aspect unneces- City," "The Bishop Orders his Tomb in S. Praxed's Church." In sarily repulsive,—a question of criticism for the full treatment of all these cases, and in fact, generally through Mr. Browning's shorter which we are content to refer him to the recently published poems, we admit the novelty of the form, but maintain that it has " Letters " of Sara Coleridge.

been abundantly justified by success. Indeed we believe that it is As we are mentioning Wordsworth, we must say the Reviewer by these poems that Mr. Browning is beat known to those who ap- makes us distrust his ear when he says he " can remember few predate him most, and that it is by these that he will live in future passages in his poems where he impresses us by the music of his generations. There are, in these smaller poems, far purer and numbers." He must surely have forgotten " Three years she grew more melodious specimens of verse, more phrases which imprint in sun and shower," " Ruth," " The Fountain," " She was a themselves in the memory of the reader, far fewer tamperings phantom of delight," " The Wishing-Gate," and " The Triad," with the ordinary forms of language, and a more brilliant and not to mention several of his odes, and not a few of his sonnets.

various gallery of pictures, than any which his later works, in We also think his criticism wanting in keenness when he corn- spite of their greater elaboration, afford. We have confidence • plains that the " morbid and querulous recluse of Maud ' is made that the most intelligent admirers of Mr. Browning will with- to be critic of a national policy," and the mouth-piece of bitter stand, and that in no uncritical or " gushing " spirit, the attempt denunciations of the abuses of peace. There is a sort of naivete of the Reviewer to depreciate the most precious and peculiar fruit about this notion of a " national policy," which matches another

of his genius. remark of his, to the effect that Bishop Blougram would not have

In passing to the consideration of the Tennysonian idyll, we expressed himself so openly about his own motives. It has always first observe that the Reviewer would fain cut away the ground struck us as a touch of dramatic propriety in Mr. Tennyson's con- from this form of poetry altogether. After instancing Theocritus ception of the character to have put all this wholesale abuse, and as the highest type of this class of verse-writer, he observes that these sweeping one-sided views, into the mouth of a recluse, rather "the oat-door pastoral images of his idylls, goats and cattle, corn, than that of a man of the world. We have no right to assume honey, and wine, shepherds and fishermen, rustic humour and that Mr. Tennyson would have made Bishop Blougram speak

Our poets, indeed, still speak as philosophers, but tho fuel for their hackneyed phrase Art for the sake of Art' applied to Poetry, and

of technicalism in poetry ; to the tendency, that is, to exalt language at

however mean, can bo transmuted into poetry in the crucible of style.

Riders was unknown in Athens and Rome—that all poetry must necessarily be embodied in a romantic form, and calls the desire for romanticism an importation from the Continent, and an outcome of the spirit of Goethe and Rousseau, of the ideas which culmi- nated in the movement of 1789 :—

" It was the dramatic aspect of the Revolution which struck the imagi- nation of the energetic and adventurous English race, and expressed itself with true national force in the roving genius of Byron and the patriotic chivalry of Scott. But the dreamy and altogether unpractical preten- sions of French idealism found no favour with the English mind. To the clear and sceptical intelligence of Byron, curiously introspective as he was and open to the power of romantic passion, the prophecies of the infinite improvement of the human race sounded like idle tales. The English aristocracy, long used tp the art of government, braced by real liberty, and schooled in the style of the great classical authors, rejected with contempt the products of French and German senti- mentalism. There is no better reflection of the national mind of the period than in the pages of the Anti-Jacobin,' particularly the excel- lent parodies of the 'Knife-Grinder ' and ' The Rovers.' This strong national antipathy servos to explain the ferocity with which the critics of that day attacked the writings of those poets who were most influenced by French ideas."

Our Reviewer, we think, must be the literary offspring of the writer who criticised Shelley in the Quarterly of 1822, and did homage to Byron in that of 1828. He has, at any rate, preserved the same spirit, and we note one little expedient, that of printing an

extract of verse as prose, which he employs in common with the elder critic. The lines so treated are some from " Enoch Arden," containing the expression that Enoch's wife had

"sold her wares for less Than what she gave in buying what she sold,"

which, says the Reviewer, " is prose, and not good prose, for the involved construction only means that she sold at a loss." It does not strike the critic that selling at a loss" is just one of those compendious expressions which are thoroughly antipathetic to poetry, the office of which is to realise for us all the concrete force of a thought, not to wrap it up for us in an abstract formula of trade. Few will deny that a thought put in the poet's way gains in freshness, and freshness in the statement of a fact is one way of fixing it in the mind. In his criticisms on the style of Mr.

Tennyson, the Reviewer seems to forget that one of the virtues of style is to be rememberable, and that being rememberable is one way in which style becomes " distinguished." He traces accu- rately enough the track through which this branch of poetic culture has travelled up to the epoch of Mr. Tennyson, from whom he is unable to withhold the praise of "curious and careful selection," of " double-distilled exquisiteness of style," of " striking " blank verse and "masterly workmanship" ; but he thinks some of these qualities "oppressive to liberty and fresh English air "—whatever that may mean—others " too easy of imitation," and the latter virtue only attributable "in a goldsmith's sense." Elsewhere he gives the poet credit for " excellent examples of word-painting in poetry," " which resemble cabinet pictures full of delicacy, feeling, and finish," and for "a determination to raise his theme, whatever be its nature, by mere distinction of style." But he selects what he calls "typical passages" to prove that the style violates a certain canon he has laid down at the beginning of his article, by

"attracting too much attention to itself." He takes one passage from " Enoch Arden "—to which we have already referred—

another from " Aylmer's Field," and four more from the " Idylls of the King," as examples of mannerism. They are open to the charge ; nor could we pretend that this is a sin from which

the Laureate is exempt. But we should deny that they are typical. The whole tone of the article is against the

notion of any advance in style having been made by the poets of the present generation, and it is on this point that we think the Reviewer will not carry many disciples with him. We should have considered that, on the whole, there was no point in which the present has made so great an advancement on the past age as in this matter of poetic style, and in particular, that Byron, another of the Reviewer's favourites, in this point compares unfavourably with it, that is, that there is little of his writing, especially in his longer poems, which could not be improved ; which does not bear the marks of haste, of a low standard of finish, and of a want of ear. Even in the finest passages, whatever may be the general effect, there are but few lines completely satisfactory. They are like grand statuesque conceptions worked out in alabaster instead of marble, passionate or sublime thoughts cheaply executed. We should agree with the Reviewer that in some of the poetry of the present

day the style is too good for the ideas, but this is not an objection against the style as such. The effect of turning from the way of writing of our forefathers to that of our own time is that of coming from something poor to something rich, and from a manner in

which many of the best things are overlaid with rhetoric, while the less good are common or flippant. Granting that, as the Reviewer says, the former was an age of action, while this is an age of ideas, we think it will be admitted that while the " action " of the past age had much in it that was ignoble as well as distinguished, the "ideas " of the present are, at all events, not open to the former reproach. In all that relates to the moral and intellectual sides of humanity—we cannot expect the Reviewer to include politics— there has been progress, and that of a kind which is likely to leave distinct traces upon style. Tennyson was the first to break up the conventional astronomy of the poets, and though it would be absurd to treat him in other respects as a great philosopher, he has enriched the materials of expression by taking up into them as much as they would absorb of the floating philosophy of the time. If it is the characteristic of the poetic language of the day, when at its best, to carry with it a trail of association which makes its texture full of a shooting play of colours, this is due to the fashion he has set, and it is not his fault if the vesture in the case of others sometimes conceals much poverty of thought. Partly by this, and partly by his greater precision in the use of language, he has set the example of an aim at distinction in style which we conceive to be a real good, as far as it goes. The reform in poetic diction which Wordsworth origi- nated was, as the Reviewer truly remarks, more valuable in its destructive than its constructive aspect, for however beautiful Wordworth's own poems may be, they afford little out of which a new general style can be built up, and the influences which helped to form his mind are too remote from common experience to be of much use to his successors. In the elaboration of his style, under all the reflected lights of the nineteenth century, Mr. Tennyson has rendered the same kind of service to us that Virgil did to the poetry of the Augustan age. The Roman poet, like Tennyson, has been accused of affectation and unnecessary twisting of language, and there has been an occasional tendency to set Lucretius above him. That the latter had a more truly poetic soul may be allowed, but he not seldom wrote mere metrical prose, whereas it is plain that this, whatever might be the theme, Virgil was determined not to do. Had the latter tried to write a philosophical poem, he would probably have given it up, if he had found himself unable to raise it at least to the level of the technical parts of the " Georgics." He assimilated all his materials with the same power—with a moderation and mastery like that of Raphael in painting—and the Virgilian manner became the model for all Epic writing, with the exception, perhaps, of Lucan, as long as the Roman Empire remained.

We venture on no predictions as to Mr. Tennyson, but we think no one will dispute that he has distinctly raised the standard of poetic diction to a higher level, and that though here and there a writer may—as in the case of Mr. Morris—adopt a different man- ner, the execution even of his work is different in quality to what it would have been without the example of the earlier poet. Even were a poet to revert to the general way of writing of the last generation, he would find himself insensibly influenced by the amount of thought and finish to which he had been accustomed in his contemporaries. And this is a gain for which we should be willing to condone much more heinous instances of mannerism than any which the Reviewer has produced.

The Reviewer's determination to bring under punishment the various objects of his dislike has led him into some inconsistency. In one passage he laughs at Mr. Rossetti for appearing in Dan- tesque guise, "in the midst of railways, newspapers, mechanics' institutes, and credit mobiliers." Elsewhere be talks of the " ordinary representative of the ' modern gentleman,' whose wildest deeds of daring are done on the Stock Exchange and whose most deadly quarrels are settled in the Queen's Bench," and of our society as " the most unromantic that ever existed." Yet it is from such a society and such materials that he demands, later on, "a' poetry reflecting our own life and thought," while a page or two further he declares " that there is no lack of fit subjects," and that " themes of public interest are certainly not wanting." Like most people who ask for "a poetry representing the age "—a demand, we fancy, we have heard before, —he carefully abstains from suggesting any direction in which this wish may be gratified ; nor does he tell us whether in any age of the world poetry has ever performed this function to his satis- faction. He refers, indeed, now to the controversial poems of Dryden, now to the social poems of Pope ; but there is a large class of persons who would not admit these works to be poetry at all. In the second of the longer passages we have quoted from him, he seems to imply that the age of the French Revolution got itself represented in English poetry, and nobody would dispute

this assertion as regards Byron and Shelley. But what can he be thinking of when he brings " the patriotic chivalry of Scott" into the same category? Are there two more opposite things in litera- ture or life than the spirit which pervades every line Scott ever wrote, and that which characterised the Revolutionary epoch ?

The truth is that poetry has very seldom, except in the case of Chaucer, represented its age in the sense implied by the Reviewer. Even Byron only represented the temper of the Revolution ; for its opinions we must look in Shelley. From Homer downwards the most famous poets have usually sung of the past, not of the present. There was an indirect representation of the age in the Elizabethan era, when Spenser sang of knight - errantry, and Drake and Raleigh sought gain and glory in foreign adventure ; and no doubt the satirical aspect of an age has often been adequately re- presented in its literature. But we believe that most ages are represented in their poetry only as we have maintained that ours is,—not by choosing subjects directly from the present day, but in the finer materials of the poetic garment, and also by the manner in which the poet seeks to reanimate the past. Chaucer is as thorough a medimvalist when he writes of classical themes as when he describes the manners of his own time ; and Virgil was more truly a representative of the Roman spirit of his day than if he had been a more perfect rival to Homer. The Reviewer asks for a return to the classical spirit. We think it is substantially before him, howbeit in a changed form. The poet of the fourteenth cen- tury treated classical themes in a mediaeval spirit. The poet of the nineteenth treats mediaeval themes in a classical spirit. What the reviewer wants is to take us back to the leading-strings of the last and the beginning of the present century. From these, in our opinion, Mr. Tennyson in one direction and Mr. Browning in another have emanoipated us ; and we do not think the Reviewer will either coax or scold us into returning to them.