From Chaucer to Tennyson Part 13

It would not be the whole truth to say that the difference between the humor of Thackeray and d.i.c.kens is the same as between that of Shakspere and Ben Jonson. Yet it is true that the "humors" of Ben Jonson have an a.n.a.logy with the extremer instances of d.i.c.kens's character sketches in this respect, namely, that they are both studies of the eccentric, the abnormal, the whimsical, rather than of the typical and universal; studies of manners, rather than of whole characters. And it is easily conceivable that, at no distant day, the oddities of Captain Cuttle, Deportment Turveydrop, Mark Tapley, and Newman Noggs will seem as far-fetched and impossible as those of Captain Otter, Fastidious Brisk and Sir Amorous La-Foole.

When d.i.c.kens was looking about for some one to take Seymour's place as ill.u.s.trator of _Pickwick_, Thackeray applied for the job, but without success. He was then a young man of twenty-five, and still hesitating between art and literature. He had begun to draw caricatures with his pencil when a school-boy at the Charter House, and to scribble them with his pen when a student at Cambridge, editing _The Sn.o.b_, a weekly under-graduate paper, and parodying the prize poem _Timbuctoo_ of his contemporary at the university, Alfred Tennyson. Then he went abroad to study art, pa.s.sing a season at Weimar, where he met Goethe and filled the alb.u.ms of the young Saxon ladies with caricatures; afterward living a bohemian existence in the Latin quarter at Paris, studying art in a desultory way, and seeing men and cities; acc.u.mulating portfolios full of sketches, but laying up stores of material to be used afterward to greater advantage when he should settle upon his true medium of expression. By 1837, having lost his fortune of five hundred pounds a year in speculation and gambling, he began to contribute to _Fraser's_, and thereafter to the _New Monthly_, Cruikshank's _Comic Almanac_, _Punch_, and other periodicals, clever burlesques, art criticisms by "Michael Angelo t.i.tmarsh," _Yellowplush Papers_, and all manner of skits, satirical character sketches, and humorous tales, like the _Great Hoggarty Diamond_ and the _Luck of Barry Lyndon_. Some of these were collected in the _Paris Sketch-Book_, 1840, and the _Irish Sketch-Book_, 1843; but Thackeray was slow in winning recognition, and it was not until the publication of his first great novel, _Vanity Fair_, in monthly parts, during 1846-1848, that he achieved any thing like the general reputation that d.i.c.kens had reached at a bound. _Vanity Fair_ described itself, on its t.i.tle-page, as "a novel without a hero." It was also a novel without a plot--in the sense in which _Bleak House_ or _Nicholas Nickleby_ had a plot--and in that respect it set the fas.h.i.+on for the latest school of realistic fiction, being a transcript of life, without necessary beginning or end. Indeed, one of the pleasantest things to a reader of Thackeray is the way which his characters have of re-appearing, as old acquaintances, in his different books; just as, in real life, people drop out of mind and then turn up again in other years and places. _Vanity Fair_ is Thackeray's masterpiece, but it is not the best introduction to his writings. There are no illusions in it, and, to a young reader fresh from Scott's romances or d.i.c.kens's sympathetic extravagances, it will seem hard and repellent. But men who, like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its bitterness and felt its hollowness know how to prize it. Thackeray does not merely expose the cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the false pretenses, flunkeyism, and sn.o.bbery--the "mean admiration of mean things"--in the great world of London society; his keen, unsparing vision detects the base alloy in the purest natures. There are no "heroes" in his books, no perfect characters. Even his good women, such as Helen and Laura Pendennis, are capable of cruel injustice toward less fortunate sisters, like little f.a.n.n.y; and Amelia Sedley is led, by blind feminine instinct, to snub and tyrannize over poor Dobbin. The shabby miseries of life, the numbing and belittling influences of failure and poverty on the most generous natures, are the tragic themes which Thackeray handles by preference. He has been called a cynic, but the boyish playfulness of his humor and his kindly spirit are incompatible with cynicism. Charlotte Bronte said that Fielding was the vulture and Thackeray the eagle. The comparison would have been truer if made between Swift and Thackeray. Swift was a cynic; his pen was driven by hate, but Thackeray's by love, and it was not in bitterness but in sadness that the latter laid bare the wickedness of the world. He was himself a thorough man of the world, and he had that dislike for a display of feeling which characterizes the modern Englishman. But behind his satiric mask he concealed the manliest tenderness, and a reverence for every thing in human nature that is good and true. Thackeray's other great novels are _Pendennis_, 1849; _Henry Esmond_, 1852, and _The Newcomes_, 1855--the last of which contains his most lovable character, the pathetic and immortal figure of Colonel Newcome, a creation worthy to stand, in its dignity and its sublime weakness, by the side of Don Quixote. It was alleged against Thackeray that he made all his good characters, like Major Dobbin and Amelia Sedley and Colonel Newcome, intellectually feeble, and his brilliant characters, like Becky Sharp and Lord Steyne and Blanche Amory, morally bad. This is not entirely true, but the other complaint--that his women are inferior to his men--is true in a general way. Somewhat inferior to his other novels were _The Virginians_, 1858, and _The Adventures of Philip_, 1862. All of these were stories of contemporary life, except _Henry Esmond_ and its sequel, _The Virginians_, which, though not precisely historical fictions, introduced historical figures, such as Was.h.i.+ngton and the Earl of Peterborough. Their period of action was the 18th century, and the dialogue was a cunning imitation of the language of that time. Thackeray was strongly attracted by the 18th century. His literary teachers were Addison, Swift, Steele, Gay, Johnson, Richardson, Goldsmith, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and his special master and model was Fielding. He projected a history of the century, and his studies in this kind took shape in his two charming series of lectures on _The English Humorists_ and _The Four Georges_. These he delivered in England and in America, to which country he, like d.i.c.kens, made two several visits.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Carlyle, Ruskin, Thackeray, d.i.c.kens.]

Thackeray's genius was, perhaps, less astonis.h.i.+ng than d.i.c.kens's; less fertile, spontaneous, and inventive; but his art is sounder, and his delineation of character more truthful. After one has formed a taste for his books, d.i.c.kens's sentiment will seem overdone, and much of his humor will have the air of buffoonery. Thackeray had the advantage in another particular: he described the life of the upper cla.s.ses, and d.i.c.kens of the lower. It may be true that the latter offers richer material to the novelist, in the play of elementary pa.s.sions and in strong native developments of character. It is true, also, that Thackeray approached "society" rather to satirize it than to set forth its agreeableness.

Yet, after all, it is "the great world" which he describes, that world upon which the broadening and refining processes of a high civilization have done their utmost, and which, consequently, must possess an intellectual interest superior to any thing in the life of London thieves, traveling showmen, and coachees. Thackeray is the equal of Swift as a satirist, of d.i.c.kens as a humorist, and of Scott as a novelist. The one element lacking in him--and which Scott had in a high degree--is the poetic imagination. "I have no brains above my eyes" he said; "I describe what I see." Hence there is wanting in his creations that final charm which Shakspere's have. For what the eyes see is not all.

The great woman who wrote under the pen-name of George Eliot was a humorist, too. She had a rich, deep humor of her own, and a wit that crystallized into sayings which are not epigrams only because their wisdom strikes more than their smartness. But humor was not, as with Thackeray and d.i.c.kens, her point of view. A country girl, the daughter of a land agent and surveyor at Nuneaton, in Warwicks.h.i.+re, her early letters and journals exhibit a Calvinistic gravity and moral severity.

Later, when her truth to her convictions led her to renounce the Christian belief, she carried into positivism the same religious earnestness, and wrote the one English hymn of the religion of humanity:

O, let me join the choir invisible, etc.

Her first published work was a translation of Strauss's _Leben Jesu_, 1846. In 1851 she went to London and became one of the editors of the Radical organ, the _Westminster Review_. Here she formed a connection--a marriage in all but the name--with George Henry Lewes, who was, like herself, a freethinker, and who published, among other things, a _Biographical History of Philosophy_. Lewes had also written fiction, and it was at his suggestion that his wife undertook story writing. Her _Scenes of Clerical Life_ were contributed to _Blackwood's Magazine_ for 1857, and published in book form in the following year. _Adam Bede_ followed in 1859, the _Mill on the Floss_ in 1860, _Silas Marner_ in 1861, _Romola_ in 1863, _Felix Holt_ in 1866, and _Middlemarch_ in 1872.

All of these, except _Romola_, are tales of provincial and largely of domestic life in the midland counties. _Romola_ is an historical novel, the scene of which is Florence in the 15th century; the Florence of Macchiavelli and of Savonarola.

George Eliot's method was very different from that of Thackeray or d.i.c.kens. She did not crowd her canvas with the swarming life of cities.

Her figures are comparatively few, and they are selected from the middle-cla.s.s families of rural parishes or small towns, amid that atmosphere of "fine old leisure;" whose disappearance she lamented. Her drama is a still-life drama, intensely and profoundly inward. Character is the stuff that she works in, and she deals with it more subtly than Thackeray. With him the tragedy is produced by the pressure of society and its false standards upon the individual; with her, by the malign influence of individuals upon one another. She watches "the stealthy convergence of human fates," the intersection at various angles of the planes of character, the power that the lower nature has to thwart, stupefy, or corrupt the higher, which has become entangled with it in the mesh of destiny. At the bottom of every one of her stories there is a problem of the conscience or the intellect. In this respect she resembles Hawthorne, though she is not, like him, a romancer, but a realist.

There is a melancholy philosophy in her books, most of which are tales of failure or frustration. The _Mill on the Floss_ contains a large element of autobiography, and its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is, perhaps, her idealized self. Her aspirations after a fuller and n.o.bler existence are condemned to struggle against the resistance of a narrow, provincial environment, and the pressure of untoward fates. She is tempted to seek an escape even through a desperate throwing off of moral obligations, and is driven back to her duty only to die by a sudden stroke of destiny. "Life is a bad business," wrote George Eliot, in a letter to a friend, "and we must make the most of it." _Adam Bede_ is, in construction, the most perfect of her novels, and _Silas Marner_ of her shorter stories. Her a.n.a.lytic habit gained more and more upon her as she wrote. _Middlemarch_, in some respects her greatest book, lacks the unity of her earlier novels, and the story tends to become subordinate to the working out of character studies and social problems. The philosophic speculations which she shared with her husband were seemingly unfavorable to her artistic growth, a circ.u.mstance which becomes apparent in her last novel, _Daniel Deronda_, 1877. Finally in the _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_, 1879, she abandoned narrative altogether, and recurred to that type of "character" books which we have met as a flouris.h.i.+ng department of literature in the 17th century, represented by such works as Earle's _Microcosmographie_ and Fuller's _Holy and Profane State_. The moral of George Eliot's writings is not obtruded. She never made the artistic mistake of writing a novel of purpose, or what the Germans call a _tendenz-roman_; as d.i.c.kens did, for example, when he attacked imprisonment for debt, in _Pickwick_; the poor laws, in _Oliver Twist_; the Court of Chancery, in _Bleak House_; and the Circ.u.mlocution office, in _Little Dorrit_.

Next to the novel, the essay has been the most overflowing literary form used by the writers of this generation--a form characteristic, it may be, of an age which "lectures, not creates." It is not the essay of Bacon, nor yet of Addison, nor of Lamb, but attempts a complete treatment. Indeed, many longish books, like Carlyle's _Heroes and Hero Wors.h.i.+p_ and Ruskin's _Modern Painters_, are, in spirit, rather literary essays than formal treatises. The most popular essayist and historian of his time was Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), an active and versatile man, who won splendid success in many fields of labor. He was prominent in public life as one of the leading orators and writers of the Whig party. He sat many times in the House of Commons, as member for Calne, for Leeds, and for Edinburgh, and took a distinguished part in the debates on the Reform bill of 1832. He held office in several Whig governments, and during his four years' service in British India, as member of the Supreme Council of Calcutta, he did valuable work in promoting education in that province, and in codifying the Indian penal law. After his return to England, and especially after the publication of his _History of England from The Accession of James II.,_ honors and appointments of all kinds were showered upon him. In 1857 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Macaulay of Rothley.

Macaulay's equipment, as a writer on historical and biographical subjects, was, in some points, unique. His reading was prodigious, and his memory so tenacious that it was said, with but little exaggeration, that he never forgot any thing that he had read. He could repeat the whole of _Paradise Lost_ by heart, and thought it probable that he could rewrite _Sir Charles Grandison_ from memory. In his books, in his speeches in the House of Commons, and in private conversation--for he was an eager and fluent talker, running on often for hours at a stretch--he was never at a loss to fortify and ill.u.s.trate his positions by citation after citation of dates, names, facts of all kinds, and pa.s.sages quoted _verbatim_ from his multifarious reading. The first of Macaulay's writings to attract general notice was his article on _Milton_, printed in the August number of the _Edinburgh Review_ for 1825. The editor, Lord Jeffrey, in acknowledging the receipt of the ma.n.u.script, wrote to his new contributor, "The more I think, the less I can conceive where you picked up that style." That celebrated style--about which so much has since been written--was an index to the mental character of its owner. Macaulay was of a confident, sanguine, impetuous nature. He had great common sense, and he saw what he saw quickly and clearly, but he did not see very far below the surface. He wrote with the conviction of an advocate, and the easy omniscience of a man whose learning is really nothing more than "general information"

raised to a very high power, rather than with the subtle penetration of an original or truly philosophic intellect, like Coleridge's or De Quincey's. He always had at hand explanations of events or of characters which were admirably easy and simple--too simple, indeed, for the complicated phenomena which they professed to explain. His style was clear, animated, showy, and even its faults were of an exciting kind. It was his habit to give piquancy to his writing by putting things concretely. Thus, instead of saying, in general terms--as Hume or Gibbon might have done--that the Normans and Saxons began to mingle about 1200, he says: "The great-grandsons of those who had fought under William and the great grandsons of those who had fought under Harold began to draw near to each other." Macaulay was a great scene painter, who neglected delicate truths of detail for exaggerated distemper effects. He used the rhetorical machinery of climax and hyperbole for all that it was worth, and he "made points"--as in his essay on _Bacon_--by creating ant.i.thesis. In his _History of England_ he inaugurated the picturesque method of historical writing. The book was as fascinating as any novel.

Macaulay, like Scott, had the historic imagination, though his method of turning history into romance was very different from Scott's. Among his essays the best are those which, like the ones on _Lord Clive, Warren Hastings_, and _Frederick the Great_, deal with historical subjects; or those which deal with literary subjects under their public historic relations, such as the essays on _Addison, Bunyan_, and _The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration_. "I have never written a page of criticism on poetry, or the fine arts," wrote Macaulay, "which I would not burn if I had the power." Nevertheless his own _Lays of Ancient Rome_, 1842, are good, stirring verse of the emphatic and declamatory kind, though their quality may be rather rhetorical than poetic.

Our critical time has not forborne to criticize itself, and perhaps the writer who impressed himself most strongly upon his generation was the one who railed most desperately against the "spirit of the age." Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was occupied between 1822 and 1830 chiefly in imparting to the British public a knowledge of German literature. He published, among other things, a _Life of Schiller_, a translation of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and two volumes of translations from the German romancers--Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Fouque--and contributed to the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_ articles on Goethe, Werner, Novalis, Richter, German playwrights, the _Nibelungen Lied_, etc. His own diction became more and more tinctured with Germanisms. There was something Gothic in his taste, which was attracted by the lawless, the grotesque, and the whimsical in the writings of Jean Paul Richter. His favorite among English humorists was Sterne, who has a share of these same qualities. He spoke disparagingly of "the sensuous literature of the Greeks," and preferred the Norse to the h.e.l.lenic mythology. Even in his admirable critical essays on Burns, on Richter, on Scott, Diderot, and Voltaire, which are free from his later mannerism--written in English, and not in Carlylese--his sense of spirit is always more lively than his sense of form. He finally became so impatient of art as to maintain--half-seriously--the paradox that Shakspere would have done better to write in prose. In three of these early essays--on the _Signs of the Times_, 1829; on _History_, 1830, and on _Characteristics_, 1831--are to be found the germs of all his later writings. The first of these was an arraignment of the mechanical spirit of the age. In every province of thought he discovered too great a reliance upon systems, inst.i.tutions, machinery, instead of upon men. Thus, in religion, we have Bible societies, "machines for converting the heathen." "In defect of Raphaels and Angelos and Mozarts, we have royal academies of painting, sculpture, music." In like manner, he complains, government is a machine. "Its duties and faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable." Against the "police theory," as distinguished from the "paternal" theory, of government, Carlyle protested with ever shriller iteration. In _Chartism_, 1839, _Past and Present_, 1843, and _Latter-day Pamphlets,_ 1850, he denounced this _laissez faire_ idea.

The business of government, he repeated, is to govern; but this view makes it its business to refrain from governing. He fought most fiercely against the conclusions of political economy, "the dismal science"

which, he said, affirmed that men were guided exclusively by their stomachs. He protested, too, against the Utilitarians, followers of Bentham and Mill, with their "greatest happiness principle," which reduced virtue to a profit-and-loss account. Carlyle took issue with modern liberalism; he ridiculed the self-gratulation of the time, all the talk about progress of the species, unexampled prosperity, etc. But he was reactionary without being conservative. He had studied the French Revolution, and he saw the fateful, irresistible approach of democracy.

He had no faith in government "by counting noses," and he hated talking Parliaments; but neither did he put trust in an aristocracy that spent its time in "preserving the game." What he wanted was a great individual ruler; a real king or hero; and this doctrine he set forth afterward most fully in _Hero Wors.h.i.+p_, 1841, and ill.u.s.trated in his lives of representative heroes, such as his _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, 1845, and his great _History of Frederick the Great,_ 1858-1865.

Cromwell and Frederick were well enough; but as Carlyle grew older his admiration for mere force grew, and his latest hero was none other than that infamous Dr. Francia, the South American dictator, whose career of b.l.o.o.d.y and crafty crime horrified the civilized world.

The essay on _History_ was a protest against the scientific view of history which attempts to explain away and account for the wonderful.

"Wonder," he wrote in _Sartor Resartus_, "is the basis of all wors.h.i.+p."

He defined history as "the essence of innumerable biographies." "Mr.

Carlyle," said the Italian patriot, Mazzini, "comprehends only the individual. The nationality of Italy is, in his eyes, the glory of having produced Dante and Christopher Columbus." This trait comes out in his greatest book, _The French Revolution_, 1837, which is a mighty tragedy enacted by a few leading characters--Mirabeau, Danton, Napoleon.

He loved to emphasize the superiority of history over fiction as dramatic material. The third of the three essays mentioned was a Jeremiad on the morbid self-consciousness of the age, which shows itself, in religion and philosophy, as skepticism and introspective metaphysics; and in literature, as sentimentalism, and "view-hunting."

But Carlyle's epoch-making book was _Sartor Resartus_ (The Tailor Retailored), published in _Fraser's Magazine_ for 1833-1834, and first reprinted in book form in America. This was a satire upon shams, conventions, the disguises which overlie the most spiritual realities of the soul. It purported to be the life and "clothes-philosophy" of a certain Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, Professor _der Allerlei Wissenschaft_--of things in general--in the University of Weissnichtwo.

"Society," said Carlyle, "is founded upon cloth," following the suggestions of Lear's speech to the naked bedlam beggar: "Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art;" and borrowing also, perhaps, an ironical hint from a paragraph in Swift's _Tale of a Tub_: "A sect was established who held the universe to be a large suit of clothes....If certain ermines or furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a judge; and so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we ent.i.tle a bishop." In _Sartor Resartus_ Carlyle let himself go. It was willful, uncouth, amorphous, t.i.tanic. There was something monstrous in the combination--the hot heart of the Scot married to the transcendental dream of Germany. It was not English, said the reviewers; it was not sense; it was disfigured by obscurity and "mysticism." Nevertheless even the thin-witted and the dry-witted had to acknowledge the powerful beauty of many chapters and pa.s.sages, rich with humor, eloquence, poetry, deep-hearted tenderness, or pa.s.sionate scorn.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Geo. Eliot, Froude, Browning, Tennyson.]

Carlyle was a voracious reader, and the plunder of whole literatures is strewn over his pages. He flung about the resources of the language with a giant's strength, and made new words at every turn. The concreteness and the swarming fertility of his mind are evidenced by his enormous vocabulary, computed greatly to exceed Shakspere's, or any other single writer's in the English tongue. His style lacks the crowning grace of simplicity and repose. It astonishes, but it also fatigues.

Carlyle's influence has consisted more in his att.i.tude than in any special truth which he has preached. It has been the influence of a moralist, of a practical rather than a speculative philosopher. "The end of man," he wrote, "is an action, not a thought." He has not been able to persuade the time that it is going wrong, but his criticisms have been wholesomely corrective of its self-conceit. In a democratic age he has insisted upon the undemocratic virtues of obedience, silence, and reverence. _Ehrfurcht_, reverence--the text of his address to the students of Edinburgh University in 1866--is the last word of his philosophy.

In 1830 Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), a young graduate of Cambridge, published a thin duodecimo of 154 pages ent.i.tled _Poems, Chiefly Lyrical_. The pieces in this little volume, such as the _Sleeping Beauty, Ode to Memory_, and _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_, were full of color, fragrance, melody; but they had a dream-like character, and were without definite theme, resembling an artist's studies, or exercises in music--a few touches of the brush, a few sweet chords, but no _aria_. A number of them--_Claribel, Lilian, Adeline, Isabel, Mariana, Madeline_--were sketches of women; not character portraits, like Browning's _Men and Women_, but impressions of temperament, of delicately differentiated types of feminine beauty. In _Mariana_, expanded from a hint of the forsaken maid in Shakspere's _Measure for Measure_, "Mariana at the moated grange," the poet showed an art then peculiar, but since grown familiar, of heightening the central feeling by landscape accessories. The level waste, the stagnant sluices, the neglected garden, the wind in the single poplar, re-enforce, by their monotonous sympathy, the loneliness, the hopeless waiting and weariness of life in the one human figure of the poem. In _Mariana_, the _Ode to Memory_, and the _Dying Swan_, it was the fens of Cambridge and of his native Lincolns.h.i.+re that furnished Tennyson's scenery.

Stretched wide and wild, the waste enormous marsh, Where from the frequent bridge, Like emblems of infinity, The trenched waters run from sky to sky.

A second collection, published in 1833, exhibited a greater scope and variety, but was still in his earlier manner. The studies of feminine types were continued in _Margaret, Fatima, Eleanore, Mariana in the South_, and _A Dream of Fair Women_, suggested by Chaucer's _Legend of Good Women_. In the _Lady of Shalott_ the poet first touched the Arthurian legends. The subject is the same as that of _Elaine_, in the _Idylls of the King_, but the treatment is shadowy, and even allegorical. In _OEnone_ and the _Lotus Eaters_ he handled Homeric subjects, but in a romantic fas.h.i.+on which contrasts markedly with the style of his later pieces, _Ulysses_ and _t.i.thonus._ These last have the true cla.s.sic severity, and are among the n.o.blest specimens of weighty and sonorous blank verse in modern poetry. In general, Tennyson's art is uncla.s.sical. It is rich, ornate, composite; not statuesque so much as picturesque. He is a great painter, and the critics complain that in pa.s.sages calling for movement and action--a battle, a tournament, or the like--his figures stand still as in a tableau; and they contrast such pa.s.sages unfavorably with scenes of the same kind in Scott, and with Browning's spirited ballad, _How we brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix_. In the _Palace of Art_ these elaborate pictorial effects were combined with allegory; in the _Lotus Eaters_, with that expressive treatment of landscape noted in _Mariana_; the lotus land, "in which it seemed always afternoon," reflecting and promoting the enchanted indolence of the heroes. Two of the pieces in this 1833 volume, the _May Queen_ and the _Miller's Daughter_, were Tennyson's first poems of the affections, and as ballads of simple rustic life they antic.i.p.ated his more perfect idyls in blank verse, such as _Dora_, the _Brook, Edwin Morris_, and the _Gardener's Daughter._ The songs in the _Miller's Daughter_ had a more spontaneous lyrical movement than any thing he had yet published, and foretokened the lovely songs which interlude the divisions of the _Princess_, the famous _Bugle Song_, the no-less famous _Cradle Song_, and the rest. In 1833 Tennyson's friend, Arthur Hallam, died, and the effect of this great sorrow upon the poet was to deepen and strengthen the character of his genius. It turned his mind in upon itself, and set it brooding over questions which his poetry had so far left untouched; the meaning of life and death, the uses of adversity, the future of the race, the immortality of the soul, and the dealings of G.o.d with mankind.

Thou madest Death: and, lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thou hast made.

His elegy on Hallam, _In Memoriam_, was not published till 1850. He kept it by him all those years, adding section after section, gathering up into it whatever reflections crystallized about its central theme. It is his most intellectual and most individual work; a great song of sorrow and consolation. In 1842 he published a third collection of poems, among which were _Locksley Hall_, displaying a new strength, of pa.s.sion; _Ulysses_, suggested by a pa.s.sage in Dante: pieces of a speculative cast, like the _Two Voices_ and the _Vision of Sin_; the song _Break, Break, Break_, which preluded _In Memoriam_; and, lastly, some additional gropings toward the subject of the Arthurian romance, such as _Sir Galahad, Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere_, and _Morte d'

Arthur._ The last was in blank verse, and, as afterward incorporated in the _Pa.s.sing of Arthur_, forms one of the best pa.s.sages in the _Idylls of the King_. The _Princess, a Medley_, published in 1849, represents the eclectic character of Tennyson's art; a mediaeval tale with an admixture of modern sentiment, and with the very modern problem of woman's sphere for its theme. The first four _Idylls of the King_, 1859, with those since added, const.i.tute, when taken together, an epic poem on the old story of King Arthur. Tennyson went to Malory's _Morte Darthur_ for his material, but the outline of the first idyl, _Enid_, was taken from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the Welsh _Mabinogion_. In the idyl of _Guinevere_ Tennyson's genius reached its high-water mark.

The interview between Arthur and his fallen queen is marked by a moral sublimity and a tragic intensity which move the soul as n.o.bly as any scene in modern literature. Here, at least, the art is pure and not "decorated;" the effect is produced by the simplest means, and all is just, natural, and grand. _Maud_--a love novel in verse--published in 1855, and considerably enlarged in 1856, had great sweetness and beauty, particularly in its lyrical portions, but it was uneven in execution, imperfect in design, and marred by lapses into mawkishness and excess in language. Since 1860 Tennyson has added little of permanent value to his work. His dramatic experiments, like _Queen Mary_, are not, on the whole, successful, though it would be unjust to deny dramatic power to the poet who has written, upon one hand, _Guinevere_ and the _Pa.s.sing of Arthur_, and upon the other the homely dialectic monologue of the _Northern Farmer_.

When we tire of Tennyson's smooth perfection, of an art that is over exquisite, and a beauty that is well-nigh too beautiful, and crave a rougher touch, and a meaning that will not yield itself too readily, we turn to the th.o.r.n.y pages of his great contemporary, Robert Browning (1812-1889). Dr. Holmes says that Tennyson is white meat and Browning is dark meat. A masculine taste, it is inferred, is shown in a preference for the gamier flavor. Browning makes us think; his poems are puzzles, and furnish business for "Browning Societies." There are no Tennyson societies, because Tennyson is his own interpreter. Intellect in a poet may display itself quite as properly in the construction of his poem as in its content; we value a building for its architecture, and not entirely for the amount of timber in it. Browning's thought never wears so thin as Tennyson's sometimes does in his latest verse, where the trick of his style goes on of itself with nothing behind it. Tennyson, at his worst, is weak. Browning, when not at his best, is hoa.r.s.e.

Hoa.r.s.eness, in itself, is no sign of strength. In Browning, however, the failure is in art, not in thought.

He chooses his subjects from abnormal character types, such as are presented, for example, in _Caliban upon Setebos_, the _Grammarian's Funeral, My Last d.u.c.h.ess_ and _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_. These are all psychological studies, in which the poet gets into the inner consciousness of a monster, a pedant, a criminal, and a quack, and gives their point of view. They are dramatic soliloquies; but the poet's self-identification with each of his creations, in turn, remains incomplete. His curious, a.n.a.lytic observation, his way of looking at the soul from outside, gives a doubleness to the monologues in his _Dramatic Lyrics_, 1845, _Men and Women_, 1855, _Dramatis Personae_, 1864, and other collections of the kind. The words are the words of Caliban or Mr. Sludge; but the voice is the voice of Robert Browning.

His first complete poem, _Paracelsus_, 1835, aimed to give the true inwardness of the career of the famous 16th century doctor, whose name became a synonym with charlatan. His second, _Sordello_, 1840, traced the struggles of an Italian poet who lived before Dante, and could not reconcile his life with his art. _Paracelsus_ was hard, but _Sordello_ was incomprehensible. Browning has denied that he was ever perversely crabbed or obscure. Every great artist must be allowed to say things in his own way, and obscurity has its artistic uses, as the Gothic builders knew. But there are two kinds of obscurity in literature. One is inseparable from the subtlety and difficulty of the thought or the compression and pregnant indirectness of the phrase. Instances of this occur in the clear deeps of Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe. The other comes from a vice of style, a willfully enigmatic and unnatural way of expressing thought. Both kinds of obscurity exist in Browning. He was a deep and subtle thinker, but he was also a very eccentric writer; abrupt, harsh, disjointed. It has been well said that the reader of Browning learns a new dialect. But one need not grudge the labor that is rewarded with an intellectual pleasure so peculiar and so stimulating.

The odd, grotesque impression made by his poetry arises, in part, from his desire to use the artistic values of ugliness, as well as of obscurity; to avoid the shallow prettiness that comes from blinking the disagreeable truth: not to leave the saltness out of the sea. Whenever he emerges into clearness, as he does in hundreds of places, he is a poet of great qualities. There are a fire and a swing in his _Cavalier Tunes_, and in pieces like the _Glove_ and the _Lost_ _Leader_; and humor in such ballads as the _Pied Piper of Hamelin_ and the _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_, which appeal to the most conservative reader.

He seldom deals directly in the pathetic, but now and then, as in _Evelyn Hope_, the _Last Ride Together_, or the _Incident of the French Camp_, a tenderness comes over the strong verse

as sheathes A film the mother eagle's eye When her bruised eaglet breathes.

Perhaps the most astonis.h.i.+ng example of Browning's mental vigor is the huge composition, ent.i.tled _The Ring and the Book,_ 1868; a narrative poem in twenty-one thousand lines in which the same story is repeated eleven times in eleven different ways. It is the story of a criminal trial which occurred at Rome about 1700, the trial of one Count Guido for the murder of his young wife. First the poet tells the tale himself; then he tells what one half the world said and what the other; then he gives the deposition of the dying girl, the testimony of witnesses, the speech made by the count in his own defense, the arguments of counsel, etc., and, finally, the judgment of the pope. So wonderful are Browning's resources in casuistry, and so cunningly does he ravel the intricate motives at play in this tragedy and lay bare the secrets of the heart, that the interest increases at each repet.i.tion of the tale.

He studied the Middle Age carefully, not for its picturesque externals, its feudalisms, chivalries, and the like; but because he found it a rich quarry of spiritual monstrosities, strange outcroppings of fanaticism, superst.i.tion, and moral and mental distortion of all shapes. It furnished him especially with a great variety of ecclesiastical types, such as are painted in _Fra Lippo Lippi, The Heretic's Tragedy,_ and _The Bishop Orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church._

Browning's dramatic instinct always attracted him to the stage. His tragedy, _Strafford_ (1837), was written for Macready, and put on at Covent Garden Theater, but without p.r.o.nounced success. He wrote many fine dramatic poems, like _Pippa Pa.s.ses, Colombe's Birthday_, and _In a Balcony_; and at least two good acting plays, _Luria_ and _A Blot in the Scutcheon._ The last named has recently been given to the American public, with Lawrence Barrett's careful and intelligent presentation of the leading role. The motive of the tragedy is somewhat strained and fantastic, but it is, notwithstanding, very effective on the stage. It gives one an unwonted thrill to listen to a play, by a contemporary English writer, which is really literature. One gets a faint idea of what it must have been to a.s.sist at the first night of _Hamlet_.

1. English Literature in the Reign of Victoria. Henry Morley. (Tauchnitz Series.)

2. Victorian Poets. E.C. Stedman. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1886.

3. d.i.c.kens. Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities.

4. Thackeray. Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Henry Esmond, The Newcomes.

5. George Eliot. Scenes of Clerical Life, Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Adam Bede, Middlemarch.

6. Macaulay. Essays, Lays of Ancient Rome.

7. Carlyle. Sartor Resartus, French Revolution, Essays on History, Signs of the Times, Characteristics, Burns, Scott, Voltaire, and Goethe.

8 The Works of Alfred Tennyson. London: Stranham & Co., 1872. 6 vols.

9. Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert Browning.

London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1880. 2 vols.