Victorian Literature-Clement Shorter

When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, most of the great poets who had been inspired by the French Revolutionary epic were dead.

Keats had died in Rome in 1821, Shelley was drowned in the Gulf of Spezia in 1822, Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824, Scott at Abbotsford in 1832, and Coleridge at Highgate in 1834. southey was poet laureate although wordsworth held a paramount place recognized on all hands as the greatest poet of the day the gulf which separates the southey of the laureateship from the southey who presents himself to our judgment to-day is almost impossible to bridge over southey as the average bookman thinks of him now is the author of a life of nelson and of one or two lyrics and ballads the life of nelson is constantly republished for an age keenly bent on nelson worship but for the exacting it has been superseded by at least two biographies from living authors that southey should live mainly by a book which was merely a publisher's commission and not by the works which he and his contemporaries deemed immortal is one of the ironies of literature southey's cowper is a much better biography than his nelson but in cowper the world has almost ceased to be interested it does not now read table talk and the task any more than it reads thalaba and madoc although every cultivated household of sixty years ago could talk freely of these poems there will probably be a revival of interest in cowper it is safe to assume that there will never be a revival of interest in southey and that his very lengthy poems are doomed to oblivion and yet it is interesting to note where southeast contemporaries placed him shelley thought thalaba magnificent and its influence was marked in queen mab coleridge spoke of its pastoral charm landor found madoc superb scott said that he had read it three or four times with ever-increasing admiration it kept charles james fox out of bed till the small hours but inexorable time has declared that these poems have no permanent place in literature time however has left us a kindly memory of southey the man sarah coleridge's assertion that he was on the whole the best man she had ever known tallies with the judgment of many others of his contemporaries who did not come into collision with his relentless prejudices relentless prejudice was equally a characteristic of southey's great successor as poet laureate william wordsworth had written all of the poems by which he will live when the queen came to the throne but further recognition awaited the author of lyrical ballads and laodamia in the thirteen years of his life that were yet to come it was in eighteen thirty nine that keble as professor of poetry at oxford welcomed wordsworth when he received the honorary degree of d c l with the eulogy that he had shed a celestial light upon the affections the occupations and the piety of the poor in eighteen forty two he obtained an annuity from the civil list and in the following year he succeeded southey as laureate the mere fact however that wordsworth wrote nothing of importance in the present reign does not permit his dismissal as a pre-victorian author his real influence splendid and serene was made upon the age which is passing away he found us when the age had bound our souls in its benumbing round he spoke and loosed our hearts in tears during the period in which wordsworth's poems were coming from the press he was scoffed at alike by byron and by the authors of rejected addresses and they appealed to a sympathetic audience coleridge had indeed praised him generously enough but the author of the ode to duty knew nothing of the enthusiastic partisanship which was to be his lot in the later years of his life and for more than a quarter of a century after his death i have before me two books which will serve to indicate the high-water mark of wordsworth's popularity one is a volume of selections from his poems which was edited by mr matthew arnold the other a volume of transactions of the wordsworth society which was privately issued to the members In his little volume of selections, Mr. Arnold, then recognized on all hands as our most important living critic, insisted upon Wordsworth's preeminence in poetry, placing him indeed on a level with Shakespeare and Milton, and assigning to Byron and Shelley a secondary rank.

Mr. Arnold, as events proved, only echoed a pervading sentiment.

The Wordsworth Society was founded with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dean of St. Paul's, the lord chief justice of england the then american minister mr lowell and a number of distinguished literary men among its members the transactions of that society give evidence that among the thoughtful men and women of the last decade wordsworth was by far the strongest influence that he was not merely a literary tradition but that he was a vital force in the minds and hearts of nearly all the most interesting people of the period students of to-day however will be well content to read wordsworth only in matthew arnold's selection here they will find him as a sonneteer proclaiming liberty with scarcely less zeal and power than milton they will find him as the sympathetic friend of the poor and of the oppressed to be dead to the charm of matthew arnold's selections from wordsworth is to care nothing for poetry to appreciate with any measure of enthusiasm the twelve volumes of wordsworth's collected writings is equally to have one's sense of true poetry deadened and destroyed we have no time now for the excursion and the prelude we have less for wordsworth's ecclesiastical sonnets and the borderers for his copious prose moralizings one has no toleration whatever it is not easy to judge whether alfred tennyson will ever cease to retain the very wide hold upon the public which was his for at least thirty years prior to his death and which is his to-day the poems of tennyson might be read by succeeding generations of englishmen if only for their exquisite purity of style music he has also in abundance in harold queen mary and his other plays there is no great gift of characterization and these assuredly will go the way of southey's more ambitious poems but in maude tennyson caught the social aspiration of his time with singular insight the world he pleaded and england in particular was given over to money-getting the capitalist was more tyrannical than the old expiring slave-owner even peace was a mere word there was a worse tyranny than that which left men for dead on the battlefield there was the tyranny which ground them to dust for a bare pittance in mill and factory tennyson never wrote with greater force or with more perfect dramatic and lyric art and his poem is as striking and effective to-day as at the time of its publication in eighteen fifty five lord tennyson for the poet laureate accepted a peerage in won the hearts of a wider audience by in memoriam, and of a still larger one by the idols of the king.

In memoriam, a lengthy elegy of his college friend, Arthur Hallam, touched the great religious public of England.

The poem reflected a certain transcendentalism of view, which was fast becoming fashionable.

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.

was in fact more and more the prevailing tone among all phases of protestantism where a few years earlier the exact opposite had been insisted upon one of the most agreeable pictures which our literary period affords is offered by the friendship between lord tennyson and robert browning the two men were seldom compared each had his partisans and each his enthusiastic disciples neither from a social nor from a literary point of view would they seem to have had much in common browning was a regular diner out he appeared systematically at every picture gallery and at every public entertainment and in all these things he was keenly interested he loved society lord tennyson on the other hand lived a retired life in one or other of his country houses he was morbidly sensitive to the attentions of the crowd and amusing stories were told of his desire to avoid the vulgar gaze considered as literary men the contrast between these two poets was greater tennyson's language was dainty simple full of grace his characters monotonous lacking in vigor browning wrote with rugged force and sometimes with an obscurity which left the reader bewildered but his gift of characterization was superb and his men and women for individuality are compared only to those of shakespeare the hearts of all of us go out to tennyson when we think of the music of his verses and of his gifts of natural description his fine and captivating imagination but our hearts and our intellects go out to browning as to one who has enshrined our best thoughts who has touched all our deepest emotions it is true that half of browning's sixteen volumes are flatly incomprehensible to the majority of us but the other half are equal in bulk to the whole of lord tennyson's writings and quite free from any suspicion of obscurity the ring in the book is not obscure it is an exciting story dramatically told so also are the poems called men and women and the dramatic idols in a balcony a blot in the scutcheon are as readable as railway novels and yet browning had and has none of the popularity of tennyson the one writer sold by thousands and his financial reward was probably unprecedented in poetry the other had but a small audience an audience which never approached to one-third of his rivals notwithstanding all this it is pleasing to note that the two poets loyally esteemed one another as the dedication of some of their books conspicuously proves to write thus early of robert browning is to anticipate in the literary record pauline the poet's first poem was published it is true in eighteen thirty three and that and successive poems were accepted by good critics as the work of a true poet nevertheless browning had to fight his way as no poet of equal merit has ever had to do and it was very late indeed in the victorian epoch that he became more than the poet of a limited circle there was one certainly who appreciated his work from the first with no common fervour for the world has been long familiar with the statement that a reference by elizabeth barrett in lady geraldine's courtship first brought the poets together in eighteen forty five