A_History_of_English_Literature

‘Contrasted Residences for the Poor’, one of the architect A. W. Pugin’s polemical Contrasts (1830; revd edn 1841). The modern poorhouse is a rational House of Correction, like Bentham’s Panopticon (see page 254); its turnkey and dissectionist’s suppliers anticipate Dickens. The medieval almshouse, by contrast, supplies food, loving care and Christian burial.

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1851-3). He turned aside from his defence of the English Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner to preserve in prose the medieval architecture of Europe then being destroyed. He drew and measured the major Gothic buildings in Venice like a geologist, studying the components of their architecture and ornament. Volume 1 analyses the results of this original research, classifying good and bad. Volume 2 cleanses Venice of its post-medieval reputation, and famously defines, after an imagined overview of Europe from the air, ‘the Nature of Gothic’. He derived the health of Gothic architecture from the condition of its producers in craft guilds, in contrast with the uniform dead finish of British factory ware, and the condition of its producers. (The Gothic revival architect, A. W. Pugin, had anticipated these views in Contrats (1836). Ruskin did not acknowledge this, perhaps because Pugin wanted to undo the Reformation as well as the Renaissance.)

Ruskin’s perception that the workman was being turned into a machine led him to denounce competition and commercialism. After 1860 he plunged into furious propaganda on art and craft, on social, political and economic theory. He poured out money, lectures, tracts, and public letters, and set up schools, organizing the Guild of St George, and teaching at the Working Men’s College. He was the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, resigning twice. Increasingly isolated, he had periods of delirium. After 1889 he withdrew to Brantwood, his house on Coniston Water, spoke little and wrote nothing. (His career was to be curiously paralleled by that of the 20th-century American poet Ezra Pound.)

Before falling silent, Ruskin wrote an enchanting autobiography, Praeterita, a lucid vision of the lost paradise of his childhood: his protected upbringing, learning the Bible by heart with his mother; private education; reading Byron; Oxford (not much use to him); learning to draw (very well). Travel opened his eyes: in a carriage specially built with a seat for young John to see out from, the Ruskins visited the houses of clients (his father was a sherry-importer, a partner of Pedro Domecq), and then toured Normandy, Switzerland and northern Italy. He studied geology, walked and sketched in the Alps or in Scotland. In Praeterita, the reformer’s remaining wish is to recompose his youthful visions and make us see - the Rhone, the Alps, a single tree. This calm after the storm is not ruffled by any word of his arranged marriage, which ended in public scandal; his infatuation with Rose La Touches his court case against Whistler.

Ruskin’s principles, in art, craft, architecture and ecology, have outlasted his immediate causes. Praeterita (‘Things Past’), ends:

Fonte Branch I saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the open golden sky calm behind the gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words, Cor magis

tibi Sena pandit, and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.

Cor magis tibi Sena pandit is the city’s motto: ‘More than her gates, Siena opens her heart to you’.

Sunset and valediction coincide in Wordsworth’s Tintern, Coleridge’s Dejection, Keats’s Autumn and Shelley’s West Wind. Soaring skies and sad clouds are a Victorian combination.

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John Henry Newman

Romanticism, on one view, is ‘spilt religion’, a definition which suggests that religion is an emotion. This was not the view of John Henry Newman (1801-90), the master of Victorian non-fictional prose. The departure of rationalists from Christian belief, and the first moves to separate Church and State in England, provoked John Keble, a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, to preach a sermon in 1833 on ‘national apostasy’: the prospect of an atheist England. This began the Oxford or Tractarian Movement, so called from Tracts for the Times, founded by Newman and contributed to by Keble and Pusey, also Fellows of Oriel. The tracts argued that the Church of England kept the faith of the apostles and of the early Church. In 1841 Newman, vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, published Tract 90, which maintains that the 39 Articles in which the Church of England had formulated its faith under Edward VI were those of the historic and universal Catholic Church. Newman, originally an Evangelical and then a liberal, came to believe that Broad Church liberalism would first dilute and then dissolve Christian belief.

Bishops denounced Tract 90, and Newman had to consider the possibility that the Church of England was not apostolic, and that the Roman Catholic Church was what it claimed to be. He resigned St Mary’s and his Fellowship, and in 1845 was received into the Catholic Church. As Oxford was the intellectual centre of the country’s religious life, Newman’s conversion was a landmark in post-Reformation history. Other clergy and undergraduates turned to Rome. Was this a ‘Second Spring’ of English Catholicism? In 1846 Newman left Oxford, paying a last visit to his tutor at his undergraduate college:

Trinity had never been unkind to me. There used to be much snap-dragon growing on the wall opposite my freshman’s rooms there, and I had for years taken it as the emblem of my own perpetual residence even unto death in my University. On the morning of the 23rd I left the Observatory. I have never seen Oxford since, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway.

This passage comes from Apologia Pro Vita Sua, a vindication of his life, composed in 1864 in response to Charles Kingsley, who had casually remarked in a review that Newman, like the Catholic clergy generally, did not hold truth to be a necessary virtue. (Alexander Macmillan, publisher of the magazine in which the remark appeared, sincerely enquired of Newman whether this was not the Catholic position.) Newman’s scrupulous history of his religious opinions showed the falsity of Kingsley’s charge and convinced a sceptical audience of his own good faith. The Apologia remains a convincing spiritual and intellectual autobiography.

Newman had studied the Church Fathers and 17th-century Anglican divines, and like them he composed for the ear, taking pains over rhythmic and syntactic organization as well as clear argument and distinct diction. Some of his sermons, hymns, prayers, poems and lives of English saints have outlived their occasions; as have his Church history, theology and fiction. An early hymn suggests his modesty:

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom. Lead thou me on;

The night is dark and I am far from home; Lead thou me on.

Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step enough for me.

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Too dim for Kingsley, this hymn was a favourite of Thomas Hardy’s. Newman’s major work in verse is The Dream of Gerontius, made into an oratorio by Elgar. It dramatizes the destiny of the soul after death.

The most valuable of Newman’s other works are his Development of Christian Doctrine, which relates the historical evolution of Christian dogma to the Church’s teaching authority, and his Grammar of Assent. Another classic is his Idea of a University, his discourses as first Rector of University College, Dublin. He defines and defends the liberal idea of education against Edinburgh Utilitarianism and an Irish hierarchy which assumed that its new College was there to teach Catholic doctrine. Newman’s ‘Idea’ is that a university is not to teach useful knowledge or dogmatic truth, nor to pursue research, but to educate philosophically and critically, to discipline and enlarge the mind.

In his Apologia Newman approaches Christian belief along converging arguments from history and personal experience as well as from scripture, philosophy and theology. His view that Providence has guided the historical development of Christian revelation brings a British empiricism into theology. His argument from experience draws on the educated imagination, developing a Romantic doctrine. Newman also thought that the Oxford Movement developed from Romanticism. In retrospect, he understood that Movement as

Barbarians, and ridicules the middle class as Philistines - a name offensive to puritan belief in the English as a chosen race. His terms ‘culture’ and ‘Philistine’ gained lasting currency. His literary criticism will be mentioned later, but his forecast that the consolations of religion would in future be supplied by poetry

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deserves the final mention in an account of Victorian sages. His successor, Walter Pater (1839-94), discussed in Chapter 11, was a critic not of society but of art and letters and the individual life.

Further reading

Holloway, J. The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London: Macmillan, 1953).

Houghton, W. E. The Victorian Frame of Mind: 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

Young, G. M. Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936; annotated edn by G. K. Clark, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977).

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy autumn-fields,

And thinking on the days that are no more.

‘These lines,’ Tennyson said, ‘came to me on the yellowing autumn-tide at Tintern Abbey, full for me of its bygone memories.’ (Tintern is on the Wye, a tributary of the Severn, on the shore of which his friend Arthur Hallam was buried.) The poems echo with voices and memories. Tennyson both created landscape and inscribed emotion on real landscapes.

He was the sixth of twelve children of the Rector of Somersby, Lincolnshire. The disinherited eldest son of a landowner, the Rector was an unwilling clergyman. Melancholia, drunkenness, violence, opium and madness visited the Rectory, yet it

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Alfred Tennyson, aged about 30, an engraving after an oil painting by Samuel Laurence, 1838.

produced three poets among its sons. Alfred, taught Greek by his father, imagined Troy on a North Sea beach: ‘Here often, when a child, I lay reclined;/I took delight in this fair strand and free:/Here stood the infant Ikon of my mind,/And here the Grecian ships did seem to be.’

At Cambridge, Alfred became a friend of the brilliant Arthur Hallam, eldest son of Henry Hallam, a historian predeceased by all twelve of his children. Arthur, who had published theology and literary criticism and was to have married Tennyson’s sister, died of a brain hæmorrhage at twenty-two. This event darkened Tennyson’s life. Rejected by his first love for a richer suitor, the poet drifted, staying with friends, writing:

... for the unquiet heart and brain

A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise,

Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

He married late and lived in the country, on the Isle of Wight and in Surrey. After Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), collections came every few years, notably in 1832 and 1842. Larger works include In Memoriam (1850); Maud (1855), Enoch Arden (1864), and the Arthurian Idylls of the King (1859-88).

Critical opinion divides over the long poems, except In Memoriam. This elegy for Hallam, expressing agonized doubts about Christianity and human destiny, is the most emotional English poem of its length. Its 132 lyrics, all in the same stanza, were not written as a sequence, but finally arranged to span three Christmasses. The keynote is pure loss:

Tennyson was the first poet to come to terms with geological time and Evolution. In Memoriam climbs slowly, moaning, towards a hard-won Christian faith. It dramatizes inner feelings and projects them onto an outer world of landscape, space and time. Notable lyrics of natural symbolism act as points of emotional transition on the journey to the third Christmas: ‘Calm is the morn without a sound’; ‘To-night the winds begin to rise’; ‘Witch-elms that counterchange the floor’; ‘The time draws near the birth of Christ’; ‘Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky’; ‘Now fades the last long streak of snow.’ The cycle makes its effect from repetition as much as from arrangement. Its composer’s gift was for song, scene and soliloquy rather than narrative or architecture. Like Wordsworth before him and Hardy and Eliot after him, he ‘sees by glimpses’ and ‘remembers’. His best work is from the first half of his career, but he kept his lyric gift.

The Romantics had turned poetry towards autobiography, real, pretended or disguised. The Victorians often avoided selfdisclosure by the use of a first-person speaker, historical, legendary or invented. Tennyson’s best poems outside In Memoriam include dramatic monologues such as Ulysses and Tithonus. Without context, monologue is open to various interpretation. In Ulysses, Odysseus plans a last voyage into the western ocean; he hopes, if he dies, ‘to see the great Achilles, whom we

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knew’. Tennyson said that the poem expressed his own ‘need of going forward and braving the struggle of life’ after the death of Hallam; the need can be felt more than the braving. The ghosts of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare and Milton speak in the rhythms and phrasing of Ulysses. Tennyson was steeped in the classical, and, more than any predecessor, in the whole of the English poetic tradition also. As an undergraduate he had translated a little of Beowulf, the first English poet to do so. He chose the lines in which Beowulf ‘his wordhoard unlocked’.

Tithonus, like Tiresias, The Lotos-F,aters and other poems drafted after 1833, longs for death. Its speaker was loved by the goddess Aurora (Dawn), who gave him eternal life but not eternal youth. Nothing is more Tennysonian than the opening:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,

And after many a summer dies the swan.

Me only cruel immortality

Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms ...

Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning

When in 1846 Robert Browning (1812-89) secretly married Elizabeth Barren (1806-61), she was the more popular poet. Only after her death in 1861, when he returned to England from Italy, did his reputation eclipse hers. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese (not translations, but her own love-poems) were much admired – ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’ - but they now seem too declamatory. The lower-pitched reaches of her verse-novel Aurora Leigh make better reading.

Browning lacks Tennyson’s beauty of verse and language, but the poets apply the Romantic legacy in ways that can be compared. After his early verse was criticized as self-obsessed, Browning chose not to wear his heart on his sleeve. Turning outwards, he wrote a number of unsuccessful plays - melodramatic acting vehicles - then went back to the dramatic monologue. Whereas Tennyson spoke indirectly through classical myth and literary legend, Browning’s speakers are, or seem, historical. He had read much out-of-the-way Renaissance history, as demonstrated in the romance Sordello. He perfected the monologue in ‘My Last Duchess’: the Duke, who speaks, has had his last wife killed because she smiled at everyone. Browning develops the form further in Men and Women (1855), Dramatis Personae (1864), and others. ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb’, a compact and energetic short story, is a fine representative of the form.

Browning’s artists, humanists and clerics, ancient and modern, talk as compulsively as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Like characters in the ‘humour’ comedy of Ben Jonson, they sacrifice proportion, humanity and morality to a ruling passion. Spirit and strong will can seem self-justifying in these confessions, for the author does not offer context or judgement. Yet in Browning, as in Dickens, the fascination of egotism is to be read against a humane and undogmatic Christianity. When authorial judgement is explicit, as in ‘The Lost Leader’, ‘Prospice’ and the Epilogue to Asolando, Browning’s attitudes are strong, even crude. Browning needed his masks. He insisted that his poems were dramatic, not personal, as did Tennyson and Hardy. The modern speakers are often lovers, dissatisfied, possessive or obsessive. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ tells of strangling Porphyria with her own hair, ending ‘And yet God has not said a word.’ The grotesque fascinates Browning, who rarely satisfies the

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curiosity he arouses. But he did not want to satisfy: ‘a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/Else what’s a heaven for?’ (‘Andrea del Sarto’).

His later years produced The Ring and the Book, a verse-novel of monologues about a 17th-century Roman murder, in which twelve participants tell what happened. This use of separate perspectives, found in the old epistolary novel, became a formal principle in the work of Browning’s admirer, the American novelist Henry James. It remains a formula of the detective story. Browning had a novelist’s fascination with the inscrutability of motives and the unpredictability of their combined effects. The monologue was a gift to Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. In the hands of its master, however, the monologue offers the fascination of a feat or a puzzle. Like many 19th-century musical virtuosi, for example the Abbe Liszt, Browning enjoys drawing attention to his own skill, and manner upstages matter. ‘Irks care the crop-full bird?’ asks the speaker of ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’: ‘Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?’

Browning’s striking talent is put to better use in short poems such as ‘Home-Thoughts from Abroad’, ‘Meeting at Night’ and ‘Parting at Morning’, and in some of his modern love poems, such as ‘Two in the Campagna’, which ends:

No. I yearn upward, touch you close,

Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,

Catch your soul’s warmth - I pluck the rose

And love it more than tongue can speak —

Then the good minute goes.

Already how am I so far

Out of that minute? Must I go

Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,

Onward, whenever light winds blow,

Fixed by no friendly star?

Just when I seemed about to learn?

Where is the thread now? Off again!

The old trick! Only I discern —

Infinite passion, and the pain

Of finite hearts that yearn.

This was a gift that he did not lose with his wife’s death, as testified by many late poems, including one, ‘Inapprehensiveness’, from 1889, his last year.

Matthew Arnold

English Romantic poetry was not always romantic. Keats was the first strongly to associate Romantic yearning with love, the ideal of post-Romantic life and literature. The only Victorian poem both great and perfect - as Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ has been called - opens with Nature:

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straights - on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

The second subject, Love, returns in the final verse-paragraph: ‘Ah, love, let us be

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true/To one another!’ But nature and love, beauty and passion, are not at the heart of the poem. There is a new reason why the lovers must be true to one another:

for the world which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

From this island once brightly girdled by ‘the Sea of Faith’, Arnold can ‘only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’. He had gone from his father’s Rugby School to an Oxford torn between Tractarianism and liberalism, and from his father’s Broad Church liberal faith to realizing that the Bible was only partly historical. A. H. Clough, Arnold’s friend and his father’s prize pupil, resigned his college fellowship in 1848, unable to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.

This crisis of faith in Christianity lent Arnold a keen sense of human isolation, expressed in the poetry of his earlier career. ‘I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson,’ he was to write to his mother, ‘and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet, because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn.’ Arnold’s self-analysis is clear-sighted, as is his forecast that ‘the movement of mind’ would bring him readers. His diagnosis of the moral ailments of modern life is sound, but he saw also that his poems lack the tonic effect of true tragic poetry. They are intensely sad, whereas his later prose, forging new roles for literature and religion in society, sparkles with wit.

Arnold’s best poetry is personal, a category which in his case includes intellectual autobiography (‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ and ‘The Buried Life’) and poems to other writers, as well as the love poems to Marguerite and the academic pastorals, The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis. In all these poems, land, water and sky lend symbolic power and plangency. His literary criticism is impersonal, ‘seeing life steadily and seeing it whole’, applying the moral and intellectual criterion of ‘high seriousness’, asserting that great literature is ‘a criticism of life’, and quoting briefly to show what is classic. Arnold’s poetic criticism has not been improved upon, even by Eliot, who borrowed much from him. His command of classical, European, English and biblical literature shows the quality of high Victorian culture. Scholar-critics such as W. P. Ker or Eric Auerbach can match his knowledge, but they do not quote so tellingly.

His own poetry meets the tests he proposed, but its style and rhythm can seem too studied. Here is the conclusion to the pastoral elegy Thyrsis:

Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here! ’Mid city noise, not, as with thee of yore,

Thyrsis! in reach of sheep-bells is my home.

— Then through the great town’s harsh, heart-wearying roar, Let in thy voice a whisper often come,

To chase fatigue and fear:

Why faintest thou? 1 wandered till I died, Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.

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Arthur Hugh Clough

‘Thyrsis’ is Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-61). Clough’s squibs are often quoted to illustrate Victorian Doubt, but his long poems now hold our attention. In Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus, his frankness, irony, conversational texture and play of mood seem very modern. His most perfect work is the early verse-novel, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, a high-spirited mock-epic romance, in Homeric hexameters, of the adventures of a ‘reading party’ of Oxford men in the Highlands.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti

In 1848 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, son of an Italian political refugee, founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young artists including John Millais and Holman Hunt, sworn to an anti-academic realism, a simple directness unmodified by classical norms, and so ‘medieval’. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood lasted five years, but Rossetti later worked with or close to William Morris, Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones. J. M. Whistler and A. C. Swinburne stayed with him in Chelsea.

Rossetti’s often unfinished paintings and uneven poems have a willed emotional intensity. An admirer of Keats, he had at eighteen written ‘The Blessed Damozel’ in which a beauty ‘leaned out/From the gold bar of Heaven’, longing to be reunited with her earthly lover. The poem jumbles sensuous with spiritual imagery; the Damozel leans ‘until her bosom must have made/The bar of heaven warm.’ Rossetti’s symbolism, and his association of erotic love with death, anticipate Aestheticism and Decadence. When his wife, a former model, committed suicide, he buried with her a book of poems which he later exhumed. His bohemian lifestyle gave scandal, and his verse was attacked in a pamphlet, The Fleshly School of Poetry.

His sister Christina Rossetti (1830-94) retained a Pre-Raphaelite truth to nature,

‘Buy from us with a golden curl’: the frontispiece to a volume of Christina Rossetti’s verse, Goblin Market (1862), published by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustration is based on a line from the title poem.

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with bright colours and clear edges. A devout Anglo-Catholic, she renounced two engagements on religious grounds, cared for her family, and wrote poetry. For ten years she did voluntary work to help ex-prostitutes. Her poem ‘In An Artist’s Studio’ reflects upon her brother’s doomed world: ‘One face looks out from all his canvases,/ One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans ... Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;/Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.’ Songs such as ‘When I am dead, my dearest’, ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ and ‘Does the road wind up-hill all the way?’ show her fine lyric gift - the best English woman poet, thought Virginia Woolf. Delicacy and a wan fancy are her characteristics, and she wrote well for children, though ‘An Apple-Gathering’ is more than girlish. Her masterpiece, Goblin Market, is a richly-charged fairy story of forbidden fruit, of two sisters, of innocence lost and redeemed. Its adult themes, close to her brother’s, are managed with a tact and discipline beyond him, and a sensuous verbal and rhythmic energy.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was an anti-Victorian immoralist; he referred to Tennyson’s Morte d'Arthur as the Morte d'Albert. A libertarian aristocrat and amateur of Greek lyric poetry, he followed Shelley and Landor. Victorian restrictiveness produced in him an extreme reaction. Swinburne was a hedonist, a literary aesthete and an expert in Greek impropriety, favouring the ecstastic Greek cults above that of ‘the pale Galilean’, Jesus Christ. Metrically he was a virtuoso, and his Songs and Ballads were in vogue in the 1860s, but his appeal lay in his inversion of respectability and of moral ‘uplift’. In him, the Victorian cult of the dead takes a post-erotic tinge. To intone, in appropriate circumstances, the chants by which he is represented in anthologies, ‘When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces’ and ‘I will go back to the great sweet mother’ and ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, can be fun. But re-reading shows them to be vague in sense, fond of their own manner, and designed to induce maudlin despair. His versions of the 15th-century criminal poet Villon have lasted better. The octosyllabics of the original curb the translator’s fluency, fatally evident in his elegy to his idol, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (182167).

Masochism and alcohol led to Swinburne’s collapse. In his last thirty years, under voluntary restraint, he poured out verse, plays, pornography, prejudiced literary criticism and an odd novel. ‘We Poets in our youth begin in gladness’, wrote Wordsworth, ‘But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.’ Swinburne’s heirs flowered and fell in the 1890s.