A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century Part 18

"And shall Trelawney die?

Here's twenty thousand Cornish men Will know the reason why!" [20]

There is Sydney Dobell's "Keith of Ravelston," [21] which haunts the memory with the insistent iteration of its refrain:--

"The murmur of the mourning ghost That keeps the shadowy kine; Oh, Keith of Ravelston, The sorrows of thy line!"

And again there is Robert Buchanan's "Ballad of Judas Iscariot" which Mr.

Stedman compares for "weird impressiveness and power" with "The Ancient Mariner." The mediaeval feeling is most successfully captured in this poem. It recalls the old "Debate between the Body and Soul," and still more the touches of divine compa.s.sion which soften the rigours of Catholic theology in the legends of the saints. It strikes the keynote, too, of that most modern ballad mode which employs the narrative only to emphasize some thought of universal application. There is salvation for all, is the thought, even for the blackest soul of the world, the soul that betrayed its Maker.[22] Such, though after a fashion more subtly intellectual, is the doctrinal use to which this popular form is put by one of the latest English ballad makers, Mr. John Davidson. Read, e.g., his "Ballad of a Nun," [23] the story of which was told in several shapes by the Spanish poet Alfonso the Learned (1226-84). A runaway nun returns in penitence to her convent, and is met at the gate by the Virgin Mary, who has taken her likeness and kept her place for her during the years of her absence. Or read "A New Ballad of Tannhauser," [24] which contradicts "the idea of the inherent impurity of nature" by an interpretation of the legend in a sense quite the reverse of Wagner's.

Tannhauser's dead staff blossoms not as a sign of forgiveness, but to show him that "there was no need to be forgiven." The modern balladist attacks the ascetic Middle Age with a shaft from its own quiver.

But it is time to turn from minor poets to acknowledged masters; and above all to the greatest of modern English artists in verse, the representative poet of the Victorian era. Is Tennyson to be cla.s.sed with the romantics? His workmanship, when most truly characteristic, is romantic in the sense of being pictorial and ornate, rather than cla.s.sically simple or severe. He a.s.similated the rich manner of Keats, whose influence is perceptible in his early poems. His art, like Keats', is eclectic and reminiscent, choosing for its exercise with equal impartiality whatever was most beautiful in the world of Grecian fable or the world of mediaeval legend. But unlike Keats, he lived to add new strings to his lyre; he went on to sing of modern life and thought, of present-day problems in science and philosophy, of contemporary politics, the doubt, unrest, pa.s.sion, and faith of his own century. To find work of Tennyson's that is romantic throughout, in subject, form, and spirit alike, we must look among his earlier collections (1830, 1832, 1842).

For this was a phase which he pa.s.sed beyond, as Millais outgrew his youthful Pre-Raphaelitism, or as Goethe left behind him his "Gotz" and "Werther" period and widened out into larger utterance. Mr. Stedman speaks of the "Gothic feeling" in "The Lady of Shalott," and in ballads like "Oriana" and "The Sisters," describing them as "work that in its kind is fully up to the best of those Pre-Raphaelites who, by some arrest of development, stop precisely where Tennyson made his second step forward, and censure him for having gone beyond them." [25] This estimate may be accepted so far as it concerns "The Lady of Shalott,"

which is known to have worked strongly upon Rossetti's imagination; but surely "The Sisters" and "Oriana" do not rank with the best Pre-Raphaelite work. The former is little better than a failure; and the latter, which provokes a comparison, not to Tennyson's advantage, with the fine old ballad, "Helen of Kirkconnell," is a weak thing. The name Oriana has romantic a.s.sociations--it is that of the heroine of "Amadis de Gaul"--but the d.a.m.nable iteration of it as a ballad burden is irritating.

Mediaeval _motifs_ are rather slightly handled in "The Golden Supper"

(from the "Decameron," 4th novel, 10th day); "The Beggar Maid" (from the ballad of "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" in the "Reliques"); and more adequately in "G.o.diva," a blank-verse rendering of the local legend of Coventry, in which an attempt is made to preserve something of the antique roughness under the smooth Vergilian elegance of Tennyson's diction. "The Day Dream" was a recasting of one of Perrault's fairy tales, "The Sleeping Beauty," under which t.i.tle a portion of it had appeared in the "Poems Chiefly Lyrical" of 1830. Tennyson has written many greater poems than this, but few in which the special string of romance vibrates more purely. The tableau of the spellbound palace, with all its activities suspended, gave opportunity for the display of his unexampled pictorial power in scenes of still life; and the legend itself supplied that charmed isolation from the sphere of reality which we noticed as so important a part of the romantic poet's stock-in-trade in "Christabel" and "The Eve of St. Agnes"--

"The hall-door shuts again and all is still."

Poems like "The Day Dream" and "The Princess" make it evident that Scott and Coleridge and Keats had so given back the Middle Ages to the imagination that any future poet, seeking free play in a realm unhampered by actual conditions--"apart from place, withholding time"--was apt to turn naturally, if not inevitably, to the feudal times. The action of "The Day Dream" proceeds no-where and no-when. The garden--if we cross-examine it--is a Renaissance garden:

"Soft l.u.s.tre bathes the range of urns On every slanting terrace-lawn: The fountain to its place returns, Deep in the garden lake withdrawn."

The furnishings of the palace are a mixture of mediaeval and Louis Quatorze--clocks, peac.o.c.ks, parrots, golden mantle pegs:--

"Till all the hundred summers pa.s.s, The beams that through the oriel shine Make prisms in every carven gla.s.s And beaker brimm'd with n.o.ble wine."

But the impression, as a whole, is of the Middle Age of poetic convention, if not of history; the enchanted dateless era of romance and fairy legend.

"St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad," its masculine counterpart, sound the old Catholic notes of saintly virginity and mystical, religious rapture, the _Gottesminne_ of mediaeval hymnody. Not since Southwell's "Burning Babe"

and Crashaw's "Saint Theresa" had any English poet given such expression to those fervid devotional moods which Sir Thomas Browne describes as "Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of G.o.d and ingression into the divine shadow." This vein, we have noticed, is wanting in Scott. On the other hand, it may be noticed in pa.s.sing, Tennyson's att.i.tude towards nature is less exclusively romantic--in the narrow sense--than Scott's. He, too, is conscious of the historic a.s.sociations of place. In Tennyson, as in Scott,--

"The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story"--[26]

but, in general, his treatment of landscape, in its human relations, is subtler and more intimate.

"St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad" are monologues, but lyric and not dramatic in Browning's manner. There is a dramatic falsity, indeed, in making Sir Galahad say of himself--

"My strength is as the strength of ten Because my heart is pure,"

and the poem would be better in the third person. "St. Simeon Stylites"

is a dramatic monologue more upon Browning's model, _i.e._, a piece of apologetics and self-a.n.a.lysis. But in this province Tennyson is greatly Browning's inferior.

"The Princess" (1847) is representative of that "splendid composite of imagery," and that application of modern ideas to legendary material, or to invented material arbitrarily placed in an archaic setting, which are characteristic of this artist. The poem's sub-t.i.tle is "A Medley,"

because it is

"--made to suit with time and place, A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house, A talk of college and of ladies' rights, A feudal knight in silken masquerade, And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments."

The problem is a modern one--the New Woman. No precise historic period is indicated. The female university is full of cla.s.sic lore and art, but withal there are courts of feudal kings, with barons, knights, and squires, and shock of armoured champions in the lists.

But the special service of Tennyson to romantic poetry lay in his being the first to give a worthy form to the great Arthurian saga; and the modern masterpiece of that poetry, all things considered, is his "Idylls of the King." Not so perfect and unique a thing as "The Ancient Mariner"; less freshly spontaneous, less stirringly alive than "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," Tennyson's Arthuriad has so much wider a range than Coleridge's ballad, and is sustained at so much higher a level than Scott's romance, that it outweighs them both in importance. The Arthurian cycle of legends, emerging from Welsh and Breton mythology; seized upon by French romancers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who made of Arthur the pattern king, of Lancelot the pattern knight, and of the Table Round the ideal inst.i.tute of chivalry; gathering about itself accretions like the Grail Quest and the Tristram story; pa.s.sing by translation into many tongues, but retaining always its scene in Great or Lesser Britain, the lands of its origin, furnished the modern English romancer with a groundwork of national, though not Anglo-Saxon epic stuff, which corresponds more nearly with the Charlemagne epos in France, and the Nibelung hero Saga in Germany, than anything else which our literature possesses. And a national possession, in a sense, it had always remained. The story in outline and in some of its main episodes was familiar. Arthur, Lancelot, Guinivere, Merlin, Modred, Iseult, Gawaine, were well-known figures, like Robin Hood or Guy of Warwick, in Shakspere's time as in Chaucer's. But the epos, as a whole, had never found its poet. Spenser had evaporated Arthur into allegory. Milton had dallied with the theme and put it by.[27] The Elizabethan drama, which went so far afield in search of the moving accident, had strangely missed its chance here, bringing the Round Table heroes upon its stage only in masque and pageant (Justice Shallow "was Sir Dagonet in Arthur's show"), or in some such performance as the rude old Seneca tragedy of "The Misfortunes of Arthur." In 1695 Sir Richard Blackmore published his "Prince Arthur," an epic in ten books and in rimed couplets, enlarged in 1697 into "King Arthur" in twelve books. Blackmore professed to take Vergil as his model. A single pa.s.sage from his poem will show how much chance the old chivalry tale had in the hands of a minor poet of King William's reign. Arthur and his company have landed on the sh.o.r.es of Albion, where

"Rich wine of Burgundy and choice champagne Relieve the toil they suffered on the main; But what more cheered them than their meats and wine, Was wise instruction and discourse divine From G.o.dlike Arthur's mouth."

There is no need, in taking a summary view of Tennyson's "Idylls," to go into the question of sources, or to inquire whether Arthur was a historical chief of North Wales, or whether he signified the Great Bear (Arcturus) in Celtic mythology, and his Round Table the circle described by that constellation about the pole star.[28] Tennyson went no farther back for his authority than Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte Darthur," printed by Caxton in 1485, a compilation princ.i.p.ally from old French Round Table romances. This was the final mediaeval shape of the story in English.

It is somewhat wandering and prolix as to method, but written in delightful prose. The story of "Enid," however (under its various t.i.tles and arrangements in successive editions), he took from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the Welsh "Mabinogion" (1838-49).

Before deciding upon the heroic blank verse and a loosely epic form, as most fitting for his purpose, Tennyson had retold pa.s.sages of Arthurian romance in the ballad manner and in various shapes of riming stanza. The first of these was "The Lady of Shalott" (1832), identical in subject with the later idyll of "Lancelot and Elaine," but fanciful and even allegorical in treatment. Shalott is from Ascalot, a variant of Astolat, in the old _metrical_ romance--not Malory's--of the "Morte Arthur." The fairy lady, who sees all pa.s.sing sights in her mirror and weaves them into her magic web, has been interpreted as a symbol of art, which has to do properly only with the reflection of life. When the figure of Lancelot is cast upon the gla.s.s, a personal emotion is brought into her life which is fatal to her art. She is "sick of shadows," and looks through her window at the substance. Then her mirror cracks from side to side and the curse is come upon her. Other experiments of the same kind were "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinivere" (both in 1842).

The beauty of all these ballad beginnings is such that one is hardly reconciled to the loss of so much romantic music, even by the n.o.ble blank verse and the ampler narrative method which the poet finally adopted.

They stand related to the "Idylls" very much as Morris' "Defence of Guenevere" stands to his "Earthly Paradise."

Thoroughly romantic in content, the "Idylls of the King" are cla.s.sical in form. They may be compared to Ta.s.so's "Gierusalemme Liberata," in which the imperfectly cla.s.sical manner of the Renaissance is applied to a Gothic subject, the history of the Crusades. The first specimen given was the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842, set in a framework ent.i.tled "The Epic,"

in which "the poet, Everard Hall," reads to his friends a fragment from his epic, "King Arthur," in twelve books. All the rest he has burned.

For--

"Why take the style of those heroic times?

For nature brings not back the Mastodon, Nor we those times; and why should any man Remodel models? these twelve books of mine Were faint Homeric echoes."

The "fragment" is thus put forward tentatively and with apologies--apologies which were little needed; for the "Morte d'Arthur,"

afterwards embedded in "The Pa.s.sing of Arthur," remains probably the best, and certainly the most Homeric pa.s.sage in the "Idylls." Tennyson's own quality was more Vergilian than Homeric, but the models which he here remodels were the Homeric epics. He chose for his measure not the Spenserian stanza, nor the _ottava rima_ of Ta.s.so, nor the octosyllables of Scott and the chivalry romances, but the heroic blank verse which Milton had fixed as the vehicle of English cla.s.sical epic. He adopts Homer's narrative practices: the formulated repet.i.tions of phrase, the pictorial comparisons, the conventional epithets (in moderation), and his gnomic habit--

"O purblind race of miserable men," etc.

The original four idylls were published in 1859.[29] Thenceforth the series grew by successive additions and rearrangements up to the completed "Idylls" of 1888, twelve in number--besides prologue and epilogue--according to the plan foreshadowed in "The Epic." The story of Arthur had thus occupied Tennyson for over a half century. Though modestly ent.i.tled "Idylls," by reason of the episodic treatment, the poem when finished was, in fact, an epic; but an epic that lacked the formal unity of the "Aeneid" and the "Paradise Lost," or even of the "Iliad." It resembled the Homeric heroic poems more than the literary epics of Vergil and Milton, in being not the result of a single act of construction, but a growth from the gradual fitting together of materials selected from a vast body of legend. This legendary matter he reduced to an epic unity.

The adventures in Malory's romance are of very uneven value, and it abounds in inconsistencies and repet.i.tions. He also redistributed the ethical balance. Lancelot is the real hero of the old "Morte Darthur,"

and Guinivere--the Helen of romance--goes almost uncensured. Malory's Arthur is by no means "the blameless king" of Tennyson, who makes of him a nineteenth-century ideal of royal knighthood, and finally an allegorical type of Soul at war with Sense. The downfall of the Round Table, that order of spiritual knight-errantry through which the king hopes to regenerate society, happens through the failure of his knights to rise to his own high level of character; in a degree, also, because the emprise is diverted from attainable practical aims to the fantastic quest of the Holy Grail. The sin of Lancelot and the Queen, drawing after it the treachery of Modred, brings on the tragic catastrophe. This conception is latent in Malory, but it is central in Tennyson; and everywhere he subtilises, refines, elevates, and, in short, modernises the _Motivirung_ in the old story. Does he thereby also weaken it?

Censure and praise have been freely bestowed upon Tennyson's dealings with Malory. Thus it is complained that his Arthur is a prig, a curate, who preaches to his queen and lectures his court, and whose virtue is too conscious; that the harlot Vivien is a poor subst.i.tute for the damsel of the lake who puts Merlin to sleep under a great rock in the land of Benwick; that the gracious figure of Gawain suffers degradation from the application of an effeminate moral standard to his shining exploits in love and war, that modern _convenances_ are imposed upon a society in which they do not belong and whose joyous, robust _navete_ is hurt by them.[30]

The allegorical method tried in "The Lady of Shalott," but abandoned in the earlier "Idylls," creeps in again in the later; particularly in "Gareth and Lynette" (1872), in the elaborate symbolism of the gates of Camelot, and in the guardians of the river pa.s.ses, whom Gareth successively overcomes, and who seem to represent the temptations incident to the different ages of man. The whole poem, indeed, has been interpreted in a parabolic sense, Merlin standing for the intellect, the Lady of the Lake for religion, etc. Allegory was a favourite mediaeval mode, and the Grail legend contains an element of mysticism which invites an emblematic treatment. But the attraction of this fashion for minds of a Platonic cast is dangerous to art: the temptation to find a meaning in human life more esoteric than any afforded by the literal life itself. A delicate balance must be kept between that presentation of the concrete which makes it significant by making it representative and typical, and that other presentation which dissolves the individual into the general, by making it a mere abstraction. Were it not for Dante and Hawthorne and the second part of "Faust," one would incline to say that no creative genius of the first order indulges in allegory. Homer is never allegorical except in the episode of Circe; Shakspere never, with the doubtful exception of "The Tempest." The allegory in the "Idylls of the King" is not of the obvious kind employed in the "Faery Queene"; but Tennyson, no less than Spenser, appeared to feel that the simple retelling of an old chivalry tale, without imparting to it some deeper meaning, was no work for a modern poet.

Tennyson has made the Arthur Saga, as a whole, peculiarly his own. But others of the Victorian poets have handled detached portions of it.

William Morris' "Defence of Guenevere" (1858) antic.i.p.ated the first group of "Idylls." Swinburne's "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882) dealt at full length, and in a very different spirit, with an epicyclic legend which Tennyson touched incidentally in "The Last Tournament." Matthew Arnold's "Tristram and Iseult" was a third manipulation of the legend, partly in dramatic, partly in narrative form, and in changing metres. It follows another version of Tristram's death, and the story of Vivian and Merlin which Iseult of Brittany tells her children is quite distinct from the one in the "Idylls." Iseult of Brittany--not Iseult of Cornwall--is the heroine of Arnold's poem. Thomas Westwood's "Quest of the Sancgreall" is still one more contribution to Arthurian poetry of which a mere mention must here suffice.

For our review threatens to become a catalogue. To such a degree had mediaevalism become the fashion, that nearly every Georgian and Victorian poet of any pretensions tried his hand at it. Robert Browning was not romantic in Scott's way, nor in Tennyson's. His business was with the soul. The picturesqueness of the external conditions in which soul was placed was a matter of indifference. To-day was as good as yesterday.

Now and then occurs a t.i.tle with romantic implications--"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," _e.g._, borrowed from a ballad s.n.a.t.c.h sung by the Fool in "Lear" (Roland is Roland of the "Chanson"). But the poem proves to be a weird study in landscape symbolism and the history of some dark emprise, the real nature of which is altogether undiscoverable. "Count Gismond," again, is the story of a combat in the lists at Aix in Provence, in which a knight vindicates a lady's honour with his lance, and slays her traducer at her feet. But this is a dramatic monologue like any other, and only accidentally mediaeval. "The Heretic's Tragedy: A Middle Age Interlude," is mediaeval without being romantic. It recounts the burning, at Paris, A.D. 1314, of Jacques du Bourg-Molay, Grand Master of the Templars; and purports to be a sort of canticle, with solo and chorus, composed two centuries after the event by a Flemish canon of Ypres, to be sung at hocktide and festivals. The childishness and devout buffoonery of an old miracle play are imitated here, as in Swinburne's "Masque of Queen Bersabe." This piece and "Holy Cross Day"

are dramatic, or monodramatic, grotesques; and in their apprehension of this trait of the mediaeval mind are on a par with Hugo's "Pas d'armes du Roi Jean" and "La Cha.s.se du Burgrave." But Browning's mousings in the Middle Ages after queer freaks of conscience or pa.s.sion were occasional.

If any historical period, more than another, had special interest for him, it was the period of the Italian Renaissance. Yet Ruskin said: "Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages."

Among Mrs. Browning's poems, which, it needs hardly be said, are not prevailingly "Gothic," there are three interesting experiments in ballad romance: "The Romaunt of the Page," "The Lay of the Brown Rosary," and "The Rime of the d.u.c.h.ess May." In all of these she avails herself of the mediaeval atmosphere, simply to play variations on her favourite theme, the devotedness of woman's love. The motive is the same as in poems of modern life like "Bertha in the Lane" and "Aurora Leigh." The vehemence of this n.o.bly gifted woman, her nervous and sometimes almost hysterical emotionalism, are not without a disagreeable quality. With greater range and fervour, she had not the artistic poise of the Pre-Raphaelite poetess, Christina Rossetti. In these romances, as elsewhere, she is sometimes shrill and often mannerised. "The Romaunt of the Page" is the tale of a lady who attends her knight to the Holy Land, disguised as a page, and without his knowledge. She saves his life several times, and finally at the cost of her own. A prophetic accompaniment or burden comes in ever and anon in the distant chant of nuns over the dead abbess.

"Beati! beati mortui."

"The Lay of the Brown Rosary" is a charming but uneven piece, in four parts and a variety of measures, about a girl who, while awaiting her lover's return from the war, learns in a dream that she must die, and purchases seven years of life from the ghost of a wicked nun whose body has been immured in an old convent wall. The spirit gives the bride a brown rosary which she wears under her dress, but her kiss kills the bridegroom at the altar. The most spirited and well-sustained of these ballad poems is "The Rime of the d.u.c.h.ess May," in which the heroine rides off the battlements with her husband. "Toll slowly," runs the refrain.

Mrs. Browning employs some archaisms, such as _chapelle_, _chambere_, _ladie_. The stories are seemingly of her own invention, and have not quite the genuine accent of folk-song.

Even Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hood, representatives in their separate spheres of anti-romantic tendencies, made occasional forays into the Middle Ages. But who thinks of such things as "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies" or "The Two Peac.o.c.ks of Bedfont" when Hood is mentioned; and not rather of "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt"? Or who, in spite of "Balder Dead" and "Tristram and Iseult," would cla.s.sify Arnold's clean-cut, reserved, delicately intellectual work as romantic? Hood was an artist of the terrible as well as of the comic; witness his "Last Man," "Haunted House," and "Dream of Eugene Aram." If he could have welded the two moods into a more intimate union, and applied them to legendary material, he might have been a great artist in mediaeval grotesque--a species of Gothic Hoffman perhaps. As it is, his one romantic success is the charming lyric "Fair Ines." His longer poems in this kind, in modifications of _ottava rima_ or Spenserian stanza, show Keats' influence very clearly. The imagery is profuse, but too distinct and without the romantic _chiaroscuro_. "The Water Lady" is a manifest imitation of "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and employs the same somewhat unusual stanza form. Hood--incorrigible punster--who had his jest at everything, jested at romance. He wrote ballad parodies--"The Knight and the Dragon," etc.--and an ironical "Lament for the Decline of Chivalry":

"Well hast thou cried, departed Burke, All chivalrous romantic work Is ended now and past!

That iron age--which some have thought Of mettle rather overwrought-- Is now all overcast."