Invisible Sights

“So far away so long--and now Returned to England?--Come with me! Some of our great ‘celebrities’ You will be glad to see!”

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Carlyle--the Laureate--Browning--these! These walking bipeds--Nay, you joke!-- Each wondrous power for thirty years O’er us head-downward folk

Wrapt skylike, at the Antipodes,-- Those common limbs--that common trunk! ’Tis the Arab-Jinn who reached the clouds, Into his bottle shrunk.

The flashing Mind--the boundless Soul We felt ubiquitous, that mash Medullary or cortical-- That six-inch brain-cube!--Trash!

The third of the poets mentioned, T. E. Brown, is of a wider popularity and a more distinguished talent than the others. His poems have remained in print and still find many readers, and the reputation of his best work is likely rather to be increased than diminished by time. A shy and scholarly figure, he was a good democrat in his poetry and wrote of humble lives without condescension and yet rather from a sympathetic seclusion than as a poet of the people. Perhaps his mind was the one of his generation in which Browning’s influence worked to most considerable purpose, though it would be at least as true to say in justice to a genuine but limited poet that his was a striking instance of a smaller poetic endowment working under the same technical instincts as the greater. In his work we find a rhapsodic note of lyricism, a sense of dramatic antithesis, a fondness for elliptical argument, all of which are in Browning’s habit. Brown’s touch in his longer poems may not be as firm as the master’s, which is merely to say unnecessarily that he was not as great a poet as Browning, but in his shorter pieces he could often score a success in a manner that Browning himself could hardly have used more effectively, in evidence of which Salve may be given.

To live within a cave--it is most good; But, if God make a day, And some one come, and say, “Lo! I have gather’d faggots in the wood!” E’en let him stay, And light a fire, and fan a temporal mood!

So sit till morning! when the light is grown That he the path can read, Then bid the man God-speed! His morning is not thine: yet must thou own They have a cheerful warmth--those ashes on the stone.

The single exception that has been mentioned to the generalization, that Browning had little effect upon the work of his greater contemporaries, is Coventry Patmore. Of all the great poets of his time he has hitherto been by far the least generally understood and appreciated. His most celebrated poem, The Angel in the House, is full of material that lends itself easily to light censure, and, however tenderly the poem may be lit by intermittent beauties, it must be allowed that the general scheme is, on the whole, at least a poetic indiscretion, which in the case of so ambitious a structure is to write down failure. But the Patmore of the Odes is another matter, and here we have a poet who can find his company only among the greatest of his time. And the manner of these Odes is one of great range and variety, not at all the range and variety of a facile imitative gift, but notably of original poetic invention. It may, in view of his relative reputation, and, indeed, of his relative stature, sound a preposterous thing to say, and I admit that I say it only to stress an argument, but if the work of a single poet alone had to be chosen to survive in witness of the genius of Victorian poetry in its many aspects, a by no means frivolous case might be made for Patmore’s claim. It is true that many aspects of the age’s genius would then be recorded in something a little short of their finest manifestation, though others could hardly ask for more authoritative witness. But in no one poet are the several aspects assembled at so representative a level of expression. The pressure of Patmore’s individual poetic energy was not so great as that of Tennyson or Browning, hardly as that of Morris or Arnold or Swinburne. His spiritual insight at its most intense was as revealing as that of any poet of his or, indeed, of any age, but in his poetic life he did not dwell as habitually at the centre of creative energy as those his great contemporaries. There was too often something occasional in his work, not in the mere choice of subject, but in his imaginative relation to the subject when chosen, to allow him poetic constancy of the first order. And that is, perhaps, on the whole, the reason why, advancing as his reputation continues to be in the best critical opinion, it is, and is likely to remain, a little below that of the highest of his time. While this is so, however, it is also true that there was very little in the manifold achievement of Victorian poetry that Patmore did not at some time or another come to by the entirely personal movement of his own genius. This copiousness in his talent was a thing quite distinct from Swinburne’s sublime virtuosity, more lonely in its origin and much more far-reaching in its influence.

One of the most remarkable poetic affinities of recent times is to be found between the genius of Francis Thompson and that of Alice Meynell. However much these two poets may have resembled each other in spiritual temperament no two could differ more decidedly in poetic method. Thompson, whose manner is piled up in magnificence, exuberant in trailing and intricate imagery, drenched with every perfume and stained with every dye that he can extract from language at the very pitch of eloquence, is in his diction the flushed and almost breathless consummation of all the more luxuriant tendencies in Victorian verse. Alice Meynell, on the other hand, with her diction so chaste and disciplined and exact, her imagery so frugal and unadorned, is a rarefied incarnation of the grave magic that the genius of Matthew Arnold had caught from the seventeenth century, a century which in so far as it worked upon Thompson did so rather in its florid ecstasy. And yet the poet from whom both Thompson and Alice Meynell derived more clearly than any other among the Victorians was Patmore, and it was no doubt a consciousness that they inherited widely divergent strains from a common parentage that accounted in some measure, at least, for their responsiveness to each other, not merely in sympathetic appreciation, but in their essential poetic natures. For Patmore, too, knew the seventeenth century, and more consciously than did any other poet of his time, and he knew it both in its serene logical enchantment and in its almost demoniac spiritual fervour. He wore both manners with a Victorian difference, but he could wear them and independently of each other. Of the first this is an example--Vesica Piscis.

In strenuous hope I wrought, And hope seem’d still betray’d; Lastly I said, “I have labour’d through the Night, nor yet Have taken aught; But at Thy word I will again cast forth the net!” And, lo, I caught (Oh, quite unlike and quite beyond my thought,) Not the quick, shining harvest of the Sea, For food, my wish, But Thee! Then, hiding even in me, As hid was Simon’s coin within the fish, Thou sigh’st, with joy, “Be dumb, Or speak but of forgotten things to far-off times to come.”

And of the second, this--

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O Death, too tardy with thy hope intense Of kisses close beyond conceit of sense; O Life, too liberal, while to take her hand Is more of hope than heart can understand; Perturb my golden patience not with joy, Nor, through a wish, profane The peace that should pertain To him who does by her attraction move. Had all not been before? One day’s controllèd hope, and one again, And then the third, and ye shall have the rein, O Life, Death, Terror, Love! But soon let your unrestful rapture cease, Ye flaming Ethers thin, Condensing till the abiding sweetness win One sweet drop more; One sweet drop more in the measureless increase Of honied peace.

These are not seventeenth-century verse, but they are striking examples of Victorian verse worked upon by two main influences from the seventeenth century, and they bring Patmore representatively into line on the one hand with the “florid and flowing schemes” of Tennyson, and on the other with the “stiffer movement and graver tones” of Arnold. And that outside both these he was also subject to the instincts of Browning’s characteristic manner the following poem will show.

A woman is a foreign land, Of which, though there he settle young, A man will ne’er quite understand The customs, politics and tongue. The foolish hie them poste-haste thro’, See fashions odd and prospects fair, Learn of the language How d’ye do? And go and brag they have been there. The most for leave to trade apply For once at Empire’s seat, her heart, Then get what knowledge ear and eye Glean chancewise in the life-long mart. And certain others, few and fit, Attach them to the Court and see The Country’s best, its accent hit, And partly sound its Polity.

Chapter VIII

Conclusion of Part I

In the scheme of the present study no more need be said of the technical side of Victorian poetry, nor need anything at all be said of such specific matters of technique as rhyme, syllabic equivalence, stanzaic structure, or prosodic abstractions, beyond to remark that in all these things, although there is an infinite variety of practice, the Victorian age added little that was essential to the history of English poetry. Perhaps, indeed, it was inevitable, and in no wise to be regretted, that it should add nothing. Further, to examine the rhythmic achievement of the age would be to examine at length the work of each individual poet, even to present a complete edition of each individual poet’s works, since the rhythmic life of each poet is at once as individual and as incalculable as are the gait and gesture of a man. It has been my purpose, rather, to consider the many tendencies that display themselves in the diction of Victorian poetry, since in and through these can be most clearly marked the distinguishing characteristics of any poetic age. In doing this I have necessarily sometimes foreshadowed what there will be to say in the later part of this study, where the content matter of Victorian poetry will be considered, and where some poets will be dealt with whom it did not seem necessary to mention at this earlier stage of the argument. What cannot be told of the technical characteristics of Victorian poetry from the examples of Tennyson and Browning and those other poets that we have considered cannot be told at all.