Lecture 13

The Victorian Age

Plan:

1. Victorian England

2. Victorian Literature

3. Alfred, Lord Tennyson

4. Robert Browning

VICTORIAN ENGLAND: PROMISES AND PROBLEMS OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY

Victorian Age began in the strict sense in 1837, when the eighteen-year-old Victoria succeeded her uncle, William IV, and became Queen of England. Victoria's life and reign were prodigiously long. When she died in 1901, she was eighty-two; her second Jubilee in 1897 had celebrated her sixtieth year on the throne. During this period England became the world's wealthiest n and, through the creation and expansion of the British Em­its most influential colonial power. The Victorians also made first serious and large-scale attempts to solve the problems of industrial and democratic revolutions that had taken place during the Romantic Age. Standing as it does between the Romantic era and our own twentieth century; the Victorian Age has a special relevance for us today.

It is sometimes hard to be objective about the Victorians. People still use the word Victorian-as a synonym for "prude" and think of the Victorian era as a time of extreme repression, when even furniture legs had to be concealed under heavy brocade cloth so as not to be too suggestive.

This view of the Victorians is very limited and misleading. In no other period of English culture before or since were new ideas discussed and debated so vigorously by such a large segment of society. Victorians were voracious readers: they thrived not only on the massive novels of Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and George Eliot, but also on lengthy political and religious tracts. The intellectual seriousness and vitality of the age were part of the larger process of growth, change, and adjustment. If the Victorians were not always capable of fully understanding and solving the problems fronting them, we must nevertheless acknowledge that many of those problems remain unsolved today. It is not at all clear, moreover, that our willingness to confront the difficulties of modern industrial society is equal — much less superior — to that of the Victorians. We have much to learn from Victorian literature. The writers of this period offer a fascinating variety of artistic responses to a rapidly changing world that is not far removed from our own.

Victorian literature: nonfiction prose and drama

Perhaps the most important idea to grasp in approaching literature of the Victorian Age is that the major writers of this period simulta­neously embodied and rebelled against the attitudes we have been surveying. This is especially true of the writers of nonfiction prose. If the Romantic Age distinguishes itself as a great period of English poetry, the Victorian Age is an equally great age of English prose. Seldom before had the problems of English society been addressed so directly and with so much creative energy by writers of essays, pam­phlets, and longer works of historical, philosophical, and artistic an­alysis.-Victorian prose writers reflected critically and prophetically on the main issues of the day in ways that both embraced and tran­scended the dominant characteristics of Victorian culture as a whole. (These writers often seem to be anti-Victorian in their opposi­tion to the superficial conception of Victorian progress celebrated by journalists, self-congratulatory businessmen, and speechmaking politicians. But in the fundamental sources of their beliefs and in their tireless commitment to transforming English society accord­ing to those beliefs, they are very much of their age.

The dominant figure in early Victorian literature was Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). In speaking out against the materialism and the lack of spiritual courage and direction of his era, Carlyle com­bined the fervor and belief in hard work of the Evangelical tradition with the Romantic ideal of the preeminence of the imagination. Carlyle opposed the Utilitarians' rational and often mechanical con­ception of human nature. In his partly fictionalized autobiography, Sartor Resartus (1833), he recounts a quest to replace belief in tradi­tional religion with a new "natural supernaturalism," a commit­ment to all that is vital in oneself and in the world.

Through his own fiercely energetic and eccentric prose, Carlyle ex­erted a strong influence on all the major Victorian writers. His influ­ence was particularly important for John Ruskin (1819-1900), the most wide-ranging and eloquent genius of the entire Victorian era. Ruskin began his career as the greatest art critic of his age. But dur­ing the 1860's, inspired by Carlyle's attack on Victorian materialism and by his own outrage at the injustice and spiritual emptiness of in­dustrial society, Ruskin turned his attention to economics and social reform. Having taught his contemporaries to appreciate the human and spiritual value of art, Ruskin now sought to persuade them to make their society more humane, less ugly and alienating. "Life without industry is guilt," he agreed with those who extolled hard work, but "industry without art is brutality." Although some­times dismissed as farfetched and unrealistic, Ruskin's later writ­ings were a major inspiration for British socialism and the labor movement, as well as for such important and diverse modern figures as Frank Lloyd Wright and Mahatma Gandhi.

Among the prose writers of the mid-Victorian period, one of the most influential and forward-looking was John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Mill's father, James, had been an important follower of the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, and in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), John Stuart Mill extended and refined the Utilitar­ian emphasis on rational analysis. But Mill's views are much less narrow and mechanical than those of his Utilitarian predecessors. He admired Wordsworth and Coleridge as much as Carlyle did, and he recognized that human intelligence expresses itself through imagination as well as through reason. Most important, Mill was a great Victorian spokesman for individual liberty, and it is in this ca­pacity that Americans have tended to find him the most sympa­thetic of the major prose writers of the era. In his essay On Liberty (1859), he argued that in society's pursuit of "the greatest good for the greatest number," the individual must be free not only from po­litical and religious tyranny, but from the tyranny of the opinion of others. In a later work, On The Subjection of Women (1869), Mill specifically extended his ideal of individual freedom and self-reliance to include women, who were both oppressed and falsely idealized under the middle-class Victorian code of moral respect­ability.

One of the most representative writers of the Victorian Age, and also one of its most intelligent critics, was Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). Arnold began his career as a poet, but in the 1860's he began to devote himself to literary and social criticism. He exposed the ig­norance, narrow-mindedness, and intellectual dullness of the Victo­rian middle class —the "Philistines," as he called them — and argued for the civilizing power of liberal education and of literature. For Ar­nold, great literature was itself a "criticism of life," which could provide individuals with the standards of excellence, truth, and self-improvement that they had traditionally sought in philosophy and religion.

In their different ways both Arnold and Ruskin elevated literature and art to positions of supreme significance in human culture by in­sisting on their moral and spiritual value. This elevation of the status of art came to have a new and in some respects quite different significance for certain late Victorian writers. In the essays of Walter Pater (1839-1894), the intense experience of beauty becomes the only source of certain value in a modern world in which rapid and unexpected change makes all other standards of truth seem relative. In a series of essays entitled Studies in the History of the Renais­sance (1873), Pater interpreted Arnold's claim that the basis for a true understanding of art is "to see the object as in itself it really is" in an extremely subjective and impressionistic way. For Pater the key question was, what is this song or picture, this engaging person­ality presented in life or in a book, to me? Pater shares with Carlyle an insistence on the importance of personal vitality and energy, but otherwise his creed of artistic supremacy could hardly differ more from Carlyle's call to hard work, duty, and social responsibility.

•Toward the end of the century, Pater's ideas were extended with dazzling wit and paradoxical irony by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), who laughed at the old forms of Victorian moral seriousness. Wilde even made a joke about that most characteristic of all Victorian virtues, earnestness, the basis of a brilliant comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest (1894). But it is important to see that while he repre­sents a reaction against Victorian attitudes, Wilde's views are an ex­treme extension, as well as a satirical criticism, of the attempts of Ruskin and Arnold to discover in art those human values missing from a society obsessed with material progress and financial profit. Moreover, the movement involving Pater, Wilde, and many other European writers, which came to be identified by the slogan "Art for Art's sake," was in part a response to the chaotic uncertainty of modern life which we, in the latter part of the twentieth century, have not yet fully learned to cope with.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

For more than fifty years, 'Tennyson was recog­nized among his contemporaries as the greatest poet of Victorian England. He was made poet laureate in 1850 when Wordsworth-died, and as decade followed decade, Victorian readers looked to him for poetic pronouncements on the major issues affecting their lives. Yet Tennyson's status as a public poet is only part of his identity. As a man he was intensely private and introspective, and some of his greatest work as an artist depends upon the creation of very personal and subjective moods or states of mind. In the largest sense it is this division in Tennyson between his public and private selves, between social and purely artistic commitments, that makes him such a central fig­ure for the Victorian Age.

Tennyson was born in the village of Somersby, in Lincolnshire, and was the fourth of twelve chil­dren. His father, the Reverend George Tennyson, was an intelligent and cultivated but very unhappy man given to periods of severe depression. He educated his children himself in classical and mod­ern languages, but he also disturbed and terrified them with his emotional instability. -Thus Ten­nyson grew up as a sensitive and well-read but often melancholy boy. He enjoyed the com­panionship of his brothers and sisters, but he also spent long periods of time by himself, roaming the Lincolnshire countryside both day and night. He began writing poetry before he was ten, and in 1827, when he was eighteen, he and his brother Charles published anonymously Poems by Two Brothers. More than half of the poems in this vol­ume are by Tennyson himself, and they are strongly influenced by Byron and by Scott.

Also in 1827 Tennyson went to study at Cam­bridge University, and the poems he had published drew him to the attention of a small group of brilliant undergraduates who called themselves the "Apostles." These friends encouraged Ten­nyson to devote his life to poetry, and their intel­lectual and artistic interests played a significant role in shaping his early career. Tennyson found his closest friend among this group — Arthur Henry Hallam, a highly gifted and charismatic young writer who Tennyson later said was "as near per­fection as a mortal man could be." Hallam's ur­banity and charm offset Tennyson's own shyness and awkwardness. In 1830 the two friends traveled together in Europe, and Hallam became engaged to Tennyson's sister Emily. In the same year Ten­nyson published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, the first volume of verse to appear under his own name. Though not a critical success, it was a clear reflec­tion of his development as a poet during the years at Cambridge. In 1831 Tennyson had to leave Cambridge with­out a degree because of financial difficulties and family dissension. He published another volume of poems in 1832, but this collection, like that of 1830, was not well received by the reviewers. Al­ready discouraged and uncertain of his future, Ten­nyson was absolutely shattered in 1833 by the news that his friend Hallam had died suddenly in Vienna. The immediate eff eat of his grief and of the other setbacks he had suffered was a period in Ten­nyson's life sometimes referred to as the "ten years' silence." Tennyson published nothing dur­ing this time, and most of his friends thought he would never write again. But Tennyson spent these years privately revising his published poems and working on new and more ambitious projects. It was during these years, as he later told his son, that "in silence, obscurity, and solitude he perfected his art."

Tennyson returned to public notice in 1842 with the publication of Poems, in two volumes. This collection firmly established his reputation and initiated the fifty-year period in which he was the major figure in Victorian poetry. In 1850 he pub­lished In Memoriam, a sequence of elegiac and meditative poems recalling the experience of Hal-lam's death. In that same year he was made poet laureate, and he married Emily Sellwood, with whom he had first fallen in love in 1836. In 1883 he was made a peer of the realm and was thus ac­corded the title of Lord. He died in 1892, with a reputation among all classes of readers that grew until it eventually exceeded Byron's in the early years of the twentieth century. In his appearance and behavior as well as in his writing, Tennyson fulfilled the Victorian idea of what a poet should be. He was a huge man with a great mane and shaggy beard, he often dressed in a picturesque fashion, and he read his poems in public with a resounding voice and with the rough manners of a man from the country. He earned considerable money from his poetry —as much as £10,000 a year —and was able to buy a house on the Isle of Wight, where he lived quiet­ly, as he preferred. He also became the personal friend of Queen Victoria and often read to her pri­vately at Buckingham Palace. His most ambitious project, Idylls of the King, is a series of poetic nar­ratives based on the legend of King Arthur and the Round Table (an "idyll" is a poetic picture or description). Addressed to Prince Albert, Idylls of the King uses a medieval context to assess the val­ues and achievements of Victorian England. Tennyson's poetic output was vast and ex­tremely varied: he wrote lyrics, dramatic mono­logues, plays, long poetic narratives, elegies, and poems commemorating specific occasions. But three characteristics distinguish all his best verse, from the beginning to the end of his long career. First, there is Tennyson's total mastery of the sounds and rhythms of the English language. The twentieth-century poet W. H. Auden said that Ten­nyson had "the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet." Tennyson was so skillful at controlling the imitative and musical sounds of language that in­dividual lines from his poems have become famous as isolated examples of this dimension of poetry: The shallop flitteth silken-sailed. ("The Lady of Shalott")

The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.

("The Lotos-Eaters")

The moan of doves in immemorial elms

And murmuring of innumerable bees.

(The Princess)

Second, Tennyson has a genius for evoking moods and states of mind in his poems. Particu­larly characteristic is his ability to create a sense of nostalgia, a wistful longing for the past or for remote experiences. And no English poet surpasses Tennyson at linking descriptions of nature or set­ting to a state of mind. The opening of "Mariana," for example, takes us inside the mental world of the title figure without saying a word directly about what she thinks or feels:

With blackest moss the flower-plots

Were thickly crusted, one and all; The rusted nails fell from the knots

That held the pear to the gable wall. The broken sheds looked sad and strange:

Unlifted was the clinking latch;

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch Upon the lonely moated grange.

Third, and in partial contrast to the mainly artistic skills we have just been considering, there is Ten­nyson's engagement with the main political, re­ligious, and scientific issues of his day. Tennyson is not a philosophical or intellectual poet, but his mind brooded honestly and responsively on the problems of Victorian industrialism and material progress, on war and colonial expansion, and on the threats to Christian belief posed by Darwinian theory and other biological and geological discov­eries:

Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems

So careless of the single life . . .

[In Memoriam 55, lines 5-8)

Tennyson's willingness to extend his attention to such large public questions in a poem based ini­tially on his own grief shows the importance of his work for Victorian readers and for us today.

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Robert Browning is thought of today as the most important Victorian poet after Tennyson. During much of his own career, however, he was better ap­preciated by readers of a younger generation than by his immediate contemporaries. Browning was an adventurous and experimental poet, and his verse seemed to open new possibilities to younger Vic­torians who felt that Tennyson had done all that could be done with traditional subjects and forms. Toward the end of his career, Browning came to be revered by a wide range of readers, many of whom insisted on making him the voice of wise and reas­suring optimism. Browning Societies sprang up in England and America to study the "message" of his writing. But as Browning himself seems to have realized, the meaning of his best poetry was more evasive and complicated than these organized admirers were prepared to allow.

Browning was born in Camberwell, then a com­fortable, attractive suburb only three miles from central London. His father, an official of the Bank of England, was a well-read and cultivated man, and although Browning attended a boarding school, he was also tutored at home in ancien't and modern languages, in music, and in horsemanship. He read constantly in his father's excellent library, and he spent hours looking at the Italian Renaissance paintings in the Dulwich Art Gallery, only half an hour's walk from his house. Browning's mother, to whom he was particularly close, was a gentle, lov­ing woman with strong religious convictions. Browning spent most of his early life in this com­fortable, cultivated family environment. It was not until he was married, at age thirty-four, that he es­tablished his own life independent of his parents.

Browning began writing poetry at a very early age: according to his own recollection, he was barely five years old when he wrote his first poem and hid it under a sofa cushion. His first book of poetry, a highly personal and confessional work entitled Pauline, appeared when he was twenty-one, and shows the influence of Byron and espe­cially of Shelley, his idol among the Romantic poets. Pauline was sharply and accurately criti­cized by the philosopher John Stuart Mill for its "intense and morbid self-consciousness." In his next two volumes of verse Browning moved away

from the subjective immaturity of Pauline toward a more objective and analytical approach to experi­ence. For ten years, between 1837 and 1847, Browning devoted himself to writing for the the­ater. Although he was not successful as a play­wright, he discovered during these years that his real ability as a writer lay in adapting the tech­niques of dramatic writing to poetry. His develop­ment is reflected in a remarkable series of poetic pamphlets called Bells and Pomegranates, written between 1841 and 1846. Included in these pam­phlets is Pippa Passes, the most interesting of his early poetic dramas.

Browning met Elizabeth Barrett in 1845. She was six years older and much better known as a poet than he was. She was in poor health and living a life of unhappy seclusion because of her tyrannical and overprotective father. The story of the love and courtship of Browning and Elizabeth Barrett is well known through the letters they exchanged and through Elizabeth's own love sonnets. After six­teen months of frustrated courtship, Browning fi­nally decided that Elizabeth's father would never allow her to marry and that she had to be "res­cued" for the' sake of her own health and happi­ness. They were secretly married in the autumn of1846, and eloped to Italy, where they lived until her death in 1861.

The Brownings seem to have been almost ideally happy in Italy. Browning himself had always been interested in Italian art and history. He delighted in studying the great paintings in Florence, where they lived for most of the time, and in champion­ing the cause of Italian independence. His literary imagination flourished as never before. It was while living in Italy that he published his finest volume of poems, Men and Women (1855). This collection reflects Browning's intense interest in the Italian Renaissance, and it displays his com­plete mastery of the poetic form through which he was to achieve his greatest success, the dramatic monologue. Browning himself described his "po­etry always dramatic in principle" as "so many ut­terances of so many imaginary persons, not mine." This formulation is central to Browning's dramatic monologues, in which imagined speakers other than Browning himself—often based upon famous figures from history or art but sometimes entirely Browning's own invention — utter their thoughts to implied listeners. In the process these speakers reveal to us, as readers, aspects of themselves and their feelings of which they are unaware. Brown­ing's models in writing this kind of poem were the soliloquies in Shakespeare's plays and the poems of John Donne. Previous writers of the nineteenth century, Byron and Tennyson for example, had written in this form, but it was Browning who explored its possibilities to the full.

When Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in 1861, Browning returned to London and began working on Dramatis Personae (1864), another collection of dramatic monologues. He also wrote The Ring and the Book (1868-1869), his longest and most ambitious work, in which the principle of the dra­matic monologue is extended to project a single murder story from ten different points of view. Browning's fame as a poet gradually spread beyond the small group of young intellectuals who had ad­mired his earlier work. He enjoyed the life of a lit­erary celebrity, dining out so often at the homes and clubs of friends and admirers that Tennyson sarcastically predicted that Browning would die in his dinner jacket. He spoke out vigorously on most of the main issues of the day, and this contributed to his image as a Victorian sage. But Browning remained curiously reluctant to comment on the meaning of his own poems, preferring to express himself indirectly through the personages he created in them. Some people have felt that the image of the socially confident literary celebrity Browning adopted in his later years was itself a kind of mask, behind which Browning's true char­acter remains mysterious. In any case, Browning had the satisfaction of enormous public fame dur­ing the last part of his career, even if this fame was not always based on an open and accurate under­standing of his work. He died at the age of seventy-two, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Two aspects of Browning's poetry are particu­larly significant for understanding his influence on twentieth-century poetry and his appeal to readers today. First, there is Browning's interest in what we may loosely call psychology, in the conscious and unconscious workings of the human mind. In his concern with the devious thinking and com­plex motives of the characters in his dramatic monologues, Browning is closer to later Victorian novelists such as George Eliot and George Mere­dith than to the poets of his own generation. But Browning goes beyond these novelists in his ex­traordinary openness to evil, obsessive, and abnor­mal states of mind. He once commented that "all morbidness of the soul is worth the soul's study." Browning also differs from his contemporaries in the degree of objectivity with which he presents the personalities of the speakers in his dramatic monologues. Browning does not pass judgment on these speakers for us. Instead, he involves us fully in the desires and energies, both good and bad, of his speakers, and then leaves us to get our own moral bearings and to pass judgment on what we have experienced.

Second, Browning's importance derives from his stylistic experimentation. Following the example of Donne and his own desire to break with the traditional decorum of most English poetry, Browning makes deliberate use of rough colloquial diction and word order, of surprising and even gro­tesque rhymes, and of harsh rhythms and metrical patterns. Browning's general purpose in exploring these uses of language was to bring his poetry more closely in touch with the irregular, unpredictable, and often distorted movements of the minds of his speakers. More conservative readers have some­times found Browning's style unpleasing in its de­liberate awkwardnesses and lack of musicality. But for writers and readers interested in expanding the expressive resources of English poetry, Browning opened up new possibilities and helped prepare the way for some of the best poetry of our own era.