Alienation a Century Ago

The Alien Vision Of Victorian Poetry by E. D. H. Johnson. Princeton University Press. $4.00.

There is much writing now about Victorianism, and Professor Johnson has here a provocative book, with an interesting thesis. A literary thesis is always a simplification, and a brief report of one, like this, must simplify it still more. He examines Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold, the three last English poets to make a great impress upon a contemporary public; and his point is, chiefly, that they had to make some adaptation of their natural or early modes of verse before they found their wide audiences. Tennyson was melancholy, full of religious doubt, and mystical; his rule of success was to employ characters given to such quirks of behavior as dreams, madness, vision, and the “quest.” Browning’s problem was to get out of himself in another sense; his mind was given to such free play with his themes as made him past following; and his great device was dramatic monologue. (One thinks of what Henry James might have been in fiction if he had not come upon his special “reporter.”) But Arnold, born more than a decade later, suffered from the breakdown of faith, which perhaps was the most poignant of the spiritual maladies of the Century; if our Century seems different, it may be because an acute pain has become chronic and low-grade, so that perhaps most writers just make the best of it. Arnold decided upon classical serenity as his cue, but he was unable morally and intellectually to practise it. He therefore abandoned poetry, on the ground that the age was unsuitable for it, and needed the services of criticism to bring it up again. So the unsuccessful poet became the great critic.