Not a candle flame but a searchlight
Peter Levi
THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF VICTORIAN VERSE edited by Christopher Ricks OUP, £15.95 Victorian poems are a constant plea- sure, and so numerous that everyone can make discoveries of their own. They differ from those of other centuries, including the 20th, in that the best poets except for Tennyson (top) are extremely hard to rank in order: Hopkins, Clare, Hardy, Words- worth, Arnold, Barnes, Clough and Browning, for example. So many of them are dark horses coming up on the outside. Poets of course are often outsiders in more senses than one, carrying their truth with them, and have been so in every genera- tion, but there is an innocent awkwardness and frankness about Victorian poets that make this quality more obvious in them. Taken together, they have an astonishing variety and vigour, the more so the more important they are, and Tennyson most of all.
But the mouldy side of Victorianism is not to be despised either. If I had any quarrel with this most enjoyable antholo- gy, it would be that on the periphery I prefer absolutely terrible Victorian poems which at the same time are somehow rather good, while on the same periphery Christ- opher Ricks prefers not very good poems that are rather interesting. The ones I like are virtually mindless, while his reveal unexpected qualities of mind in writers like T. E. Brown and Francis Thompson. He likes the intellectual mechanism of Victo- rian doubt and failure, where I feel the appeal of optimism dissolving unconscious- ly in pessimism, as in Arnold's 'Rugby Chapel' and 'Westminster Abbey', but we coincide in 'In Memoriam'. Lovers of Tennyson already owe more to Christ- opher Ricks than to any other scholar; in this anthology he has extended the debt. It is good to have the original of 'Wee Willy Winky' and some amusing satiric verses by R. L. Stevenson. William Barnes, a voice antiphonal to Tennyson's though not over the whole of Tennyson's range, comes into his own at last. Am I right in thinking we owe his rediscovery and almost his survival to Ralph Vaughan Williams? Hardy's advocacy was not enough, though it should have been, and Geoffrey Grigson's was not enough. I take John Clare to be well known and admired by now, but the selection here is of poems that perfectly fit within the Victorian estab- lishment, not of those poems that chal- lenge it as an alternative. Perhaps that is inevitable in an Oxford Book. The Queen came to the throne in 1837, when Crabbe had been dead five years, though in many ways Crabbe was a more Victorian charac- ter than Wordsworth, his junior by 16 years and the oldest poet in this anthology. That aged eagle stretches his wings in two late poems beyond the powers of almost any of the younger writers.
The Queen died in 1901, and from the point of view of poetry her reign ended brilliantly with Dowson, Wilde, Kipling, Beardsley and Housman. The selection of Housman is powerfully pointed: he over- flows his apparent limits as a poet rather as Hopkins does. William Canton (1845- 1926) is quite new to me, and his poem on a horse in summer is a thrilling discovery.
Broad August burns in milky skies, The world is blanched with hazy heat; The vast green pasture, even, lies Too hot and bright for eyes and feet.
One feels that the poet, like his horse 'still as a stone', is no more than a medium for the place and the time. 'He feels the vaguely sweet content Of perfect sloth in limb and brain'. But I could not quite share the degree of enthusiasm that Christopher Ricks orthodoxly shows for John Gray. My sticking-point is represented by the lines: And wraps his body in vests of silk; Ilk is as beautiful as ilk.
I would prefer a bit of ranting Herbed Trench; The Nutter', for example, which, is a rehash of Keats with touches °I Kenneth Grahame, and occurs in Deirdre Wed and Other Poems (1901). As a poet he is often contemptibly bad, but with a certain run of sap or streak of gold. All tit, C same, John Gray's short poem 'Spleen' is far better than anything by poor 01° Trench, and he is worth four fifths of the.. space he gets. Thirty years ago, Gray and Davidson were rather new discoveries, indeed, only 40 years ago some of the poets in this anthology had not yet been forgot- ten, let alone rediscovered. Eugene Lee- Hamilton, for example, had then been dead for 40 years, a low point in most posthumous reputations, but his ghost lingered in school text-books. lo dig green depths rot ingot-laden ships', as .17 remarks. Tennyson's brother Frederic!' (1807-1898) wonderfully concludes this volume with a sonnet published only of 1913; his brother Charles was one year younger, but he also died younger, and his sonnets were collected posthumously by Hallam Tennyson in 1880. 'I may add that in my Father's judgment some of the sonnets have all the tenderness of the Greek epigram, and that he ranks a few of them among the noblest in our language ,: In this selection I missed 'Autumn', which has something in common with Trench5 'Nutter', and the successfully original Pau of sonnets on 'The Steam Threshing- Machine (With the Straw Carrier)'. Of all the poets represented who seem due for further promotion, I think Edward Lear and Tennyson's brothers and William Can ton are the outstanding examples. But an anthology that pretends to au- thority will stand or fall by its serious .
treatment of central characters. This one is admirable, even in the difficult area of dethroned gods like Swinburne and Mere- dith who must still be treated with intelli- gent respect. Secondly it poses the ques- tion whether or not it presents a new and convincing picture of Victorian poetry. The Picture is certainly sharper than be- fore, and much more interesting to intel- lbectual historians than older anthologies, ut the newness is easy to miss, because this age has defined itself by constantly altering its view of the Victorians, and so the changes in our expectations of Victo- rian poetry have come gradually. In the generation of Auden and Betjeman, a taste for Victorian minor poets was a conscious eccentricity, a private joke, almost an affectation. Christopher Ricks has not ventured far into their territory; I rather WishWish he had. This is an anthology that he can take seriously. It is not a candle flame in a ruined garden at night, but a reliable searchlight, and I cannot help regretting the candle flame. Only among Minor Victorian poets, of all the poetry in the ,Avorld, one used to be free to follow one's whim, because nobody cared about There is another way of looking at the subject. Suppose Victorian poetry were the poems written by those born in the Queen's reign, not those who died or went Oil writing in it. Swinburne would then be the first Victorian poet; Tennyson, Clough, Browning, Barnes and Arnold would belong to an earlier age, which they would have to share with Wordsworth and Crabbe. That would be a mightier age than but age of Swinburne and Robert Graves, °Ut the second, the age of those born under Victoria, would include the whole of mod- ernism with all its subcurrents from begin- ...fling to end, with Hopkins, Hardy and Yeats for its great poets. Under Victoria the sound of poetry became more and more exquisite, but the subject-matter got lost, or relegated to minor verse; all that retrained by the Nineties was an aesthetic Even like the aroma without the soup. .c,ven in so great a poet as Tennyson, the Monumental and the pastoral subjects of great poems ring hollow. Nothing-is ex- pressed but the soul and its melancholy, the landscape and its bird noises. 'London Snow' by Bridges is a poem I greatly admire but almost any Ninetyish poet has Ricks to say, and at this stage Christopher Kicks has concentrated on what is said: not Vicll a bad point of view for a critic of
orian poetry. We have not come to the end of the Victorians by any means. The rhythms of Tennyson are like the falling of a leaf, yet they have entered somehow into the
language, more than Eliot's or Auden's r"Ythnis. The low point of English poetry °ccurred in a generation that preferred Browning to Tennyson. Yet Browning d.eserves every inch of his space. I would like to add to it, 'Your ghost will walk you lover of trees . . a perfect lyric poem that bridges the daunting gap between Tennyson and Hardy.
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