Chapter VI: Conclusion

Nothing is vainer than for criticism of poetry to suppose that it can give anything of the pleasure to be found in poetry itself. In making these notes about Victorian poetry, and in reading over again the work of the masters who wrote it, I am acutely aware how dismally inadequate any commentary upon such work must be. I am aware, also, that one could confront every generalisation that one makes with some modifying example; I have, for instance, since saying what I did about the love poetry of by-gone ages, been haunted by Bishop King’s exquisitely personal and touching _Exequy_ on his “dead saint.” But these exercises have their times, and they are at least an occasion for refreshing memories that are apt to become a little dulled even for the most loyal and industrious of us. Further, abstract theorising about art at least does the art no harm and may sometimes serve it. No one is likely to read the _Morte d’Arthur_ or the _Garden of Proserpine_ or the _Scholar Gipsy_ or _Pippa Passes_ with any more poetic delight for anything that he may find in this essay, but here and there a friendly mind may get a little pleasure of a real though less essential kind in considering for a moment, apart from the fundamental things of poetry that persist from one generation to another, what were the characteristics that distinguished an age, of which these are representative creations, from the other ages with which it has now taken an equal and immortal place.

INDEX

A

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 19

Arnold, Matthew, 20, 21, 31, 32, 55, 66, 102, 109–114, 121–125,
134, 149, 151, 173, 210, 220, 228

Aytoun, William Edmondstoune, 169

B

Beardsley, Aubrey, 143

Blake, William, 23, 24, 31, 211

Bottomley, Gordon, 20

Bridges, Robert, 107

Brontë, Emily, 219

Brooke, Stopford, 202

Brown, T. E., 143, 146

Browne, Thomas, 114

Browning, Robert, 22, 32, 55, 92–103, 109, 114–117, 119, 142–147,
153, 156, 173, 210, 212, 217, 220, 226, 228

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 22, 214, 220, 226, 227

Bunyan, John, 165

Burbage, Richard, 64

Burns, Robert, 49

Butler, Dr. (of Trinity), 202

Byron, Lord, 22, 26, 49, 54, 64, 77, 94, 96, 125, 200, 225

C

Chapman, George, 51

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 35–37, 41, 56–59, 72, 74, 126, 131, 167, 170–173

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 104, 107

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 52

Collins, William, 23, 24, 44

Cory, William, 105

Crashaw, Richard, 17, 41, 219

D

Dante, Alighieri, 223

Davies, W. H., 19

Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, 202

Dixon, Richard Watson, 106, 107

Domett, Alfred, 143, 145

Donne, John, 17, 31, 38, 78, 114, 212, 225

Dowson, Ernest, 143

Drayton, Michael, 215

Dryden, John, 17, 200

E

Eliot, George, 202

F

FitzGerald, Edward, 202, 207, 215–219, 228

G

Galsworthy, John, 66

Gibson, Wilfred Wilson, 19

Gladstone, W. E., 202

Gordon, General, 202

Gosse, Edmund, 182

Gray, Thomas, 23, 24, 43, 47, 110, 112

Green, J. R., 202

Green, Matthew, 46

H

Hammond, James, 221

Hardy, Thomas, 30

Herbert, George, 41

Herrick, Robert, 17–20, 78, 215

Hodgson, Ralph, 219

Homer, 160, 174

Horne, Richard Hengist, 143

Housman, A. E., 19

Huxley, Professor, 202

J

Jago, Richard, 44

Jonson, Ben, 31, 66

Jowett, Benjamin, 202, 207

K

Keats, John, 22, 25, 31, 51, 54, 63, 77, 89, 94, 114, 125, 138,
225, 227

Kendon, Frank, 30

King, Henry, 17, 230

L

Landor, Walter Savage, 22, 53, 225

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 114

Lovelace, Richard, 17, 31, 38

M

Macaulay, Lord, 167, 172

Malory, 178, 184

Mare, Walter de la, 19, 28

Marlowe, Christopher, 51

Marsh, Edward, 18

Marvell, Andrew, 122, 139, 228

Masefield, John, 19, 163

Meynell, Alice, 19, 150, 151

Milton, John, 18, 20, 33, 38, 69, 77, 94, 110, 112, 118, 125, 137,
160, 194–199, 204, 210, 221

Morris, William, 22, 29, 55, 125, 128–134, 142, 149, 169–173, 217,
229

Murray, Gilbert, 105

N

Nicolson, Harold, 161, 203

P

Palgrave, Francis, 202

Patmore, Coventry, 148–154, 220, 226–228

Poe, Edgar Allan, 114

Pope, Alexander, 23, 25, 41, 45, 77, 195–198, 200, 204–207, 211

R

Roden, Noel, 105

Rossetti, Christina, 22, 55, 215, 220, 228

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 22, 55, 91, 125–129, 133, 202, 226–229

S

Saintsbury, Professor, 110, 125

Scott, Sir Walter, 166, 167, 172, 200

Shakespeare, William, 37, 58–66, 68, 77, 122, 137, 159, 174, 187,
191–198, 204, 205, 210, 216, 224

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 22, 25, 31, 50, 55, 125, 159, 187, 225–227

Smart, Christopher, 211

Spenser, Edmund, 51, 125

Suckling, Sir John, 31

Swinburne, Algernon C., 20–22, 28, 55, 125, 134–141, 149, 173, 186,
226, 227

Sylvester, Joshua, 218

T

Tabley, Lord de, 91, 106, 107

Taylor, Jeremy, 113

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 22, 30, 55, 57, 62, 66, 71–95, 102,
106–114, 125, 133–138, 142, 144, 149, 153, 156, 161–163, 173,
176–192, 199–210, 213, 220, 226

Tennyson, Frederick, 104

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 202

Thompson, Francis, 150

Tindall, Professor, 202

V

Vaughan, Henry, 17, 31, 40, 114, 139, 211

Vere, Aubrey de, 104, 114, 123

W

Walker, Professor Hugh, 169

Walton, Izaak, 114

Watson, Sir William, 120

Webster, John, 31

Whitman, Walt, 33

Wordsworth, William, 22–24, 30, 46–49, 52, 62, 78, 111, 112, 119,
125, 138, 166, 196–199, 210, 225, 227, 229.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The sifting of the minor poetic writers of the eighteenth century is a task to which critical attention is now being very profitably turned. Many readers of poetry no doubt associate Richard Jago and Matthew Green, for example, in their minds as belonging to the same negligible group, whereas Jago was a poor dull fellow in verse and Green a very considerable poet indeed.

[2] That is to say, Chaucer’s language as intelligible to us. Lost in it, no doubt, are associations from earlier speech.

[3] These remarks, it need hardly be added, apply to part of Byron’s work only.

[4] This is not to deny the quality to every poet before Tennyson, obviously. But never before had it been so salient a characteristic of a poetic style, nor has it been since.

[5] Let me repeat that this is for immediate purposes of definition only. Browning’s individual mark is clear enough upon his poetry right through.

[6] Frederick Tennyson.

[7] Aubrey de Vere (the younger).

[8] Arthur Hugh Clough. Tennyson would have avoided the repeated rhyme sounds of the first and second stanzas, and the third, given here for the sense, is below standard.

[9] _Heraclitus_, by William Cory. Cory (Johnson by birth) was a very occasional poet, but when he wrote like this Tennyson himself could have done it no better, although no less an authority than Professor Gilbert Murray, in an instructive paper on verse translation, has recently complained, quite unaccountably as it seems to me, that the poem fails by reason of triviality in diction and rhythm.

[10] Richard Watson Dixon.

[11] Roden Noel.

[12] Lord de Tabley.

[13] I have not in general much use for criticism that quotes other criticism, but at this time of day any one may steal from the stores of Professor Saintsbury’s learning and wisdom, and although there is no modern critic, perhaps, so provocative as he, there is none who has left his mark so indelibly upon every subsequent judgment of English poetry.

[14] Each reader may have his quarrel with my instances. But they served an argument that seemed worth pursuing.

[15] This, I need not say, is a very partial definition of a decade that was not exclusively represented by the sallow genius of an Ernest Dowson and an Aubrey Beardsley.

[16] Mr. Harold Nicolson’s recently published book on Tennyson illustrates my point. The book is an acute and, in nearly every respect, a sympathetic piece of thinking, but it is coloured by the circumstance, due to the reaction of which I have spoken, that Mr. Nicolson often thinks Tennyson intellectually very little apples. And in this respect--in this respect alone--he patronises Tennyson, and the result is unfortunate, not for Tennyson but for Mr. Nicolson. It really will not do to say that Tennyson was an exquisite lyric poet but a blundering old prig intellectually. Tennyson’s intellectual approach and expression were not Mr. Nicolson’s, and it is perfectly right for Mr. Nicolson to stand for his own. But he should have remembered that Tennyson was not only the lyrist that he admits him to be, but, when all is said and done, a giant among the minds of a remarkable age. Had he done this he would not have marred what is otherwise a very beautiful piece of critical exposition.

[17] It is unnecessary here to discuss the claim that would place _Sigurd_ in the region of epic.

[18] It is interesting to hear that the dealers are anticipating the moment when such things will become criterions of taste for the dilettante. Warehouses are being stocked for the new demand that may arise at any moment for rooms adorned by horsehair furniture.

[19] That is to say, by causing a reaction that supposes it to be outside poetry’s function to have any moral purpose whatever.

[20] I speak of this poem as though it were FitzGerald’s original composition, without reference to Omar, which for essential purposes it is.

[21] 1563–1618, the translator of du Bartas, and a prolific poet known to most readers by one lovely sonnet, but otherwise neglected far beyond his desert.