Every Reader's Browning

  

     This is the sixteenth in a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. Consult the Index for the current month under Blog Archive on the right.  An introduction called “Why Read Poetry?” is available at http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-read-poetry.html. 

     In this series I limit my focus to the discussion, often including a close paraphrase, of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. 

     Though poems by Browning are easily available online, I have appended the few I discuss that are not found in the text.

 

      Robert Browning was probably the chief contender with Alfred, Lord Tennyson for leading Victorian poet.  While Tennyson’s mastery of sound and his willing acceptance of the role of English national poet, often repeating received ideas, brought him immense prestige, Browning developed along a more idiosyncratic path to reach a comparable level of influence.  A Marxist-minded critic of the old school might, without going far wrong, suggest that the nobleman who held the laureateship was the choice of the old order and that Browning, whose political views were decidedly progressive, represented the more enlightened portion of the bourgeoisie.  

     Neither has fared well in popular taste in the years since though each has yet his devotees.  Tennyson’s influence was prolonged by his use in school curriculums until a generation or so ago.  Many of us can recall making our way through Idylls of the King and “In Memoriam.”  Meanwhile, except for a few popular anthology pieces, Browning has fallen into deeper obscurity, due in part to his fondness for long narrative poems of a sort rare today.  Most of the lengthy twentieth-century poems (The Cantos, Paterson, A) are bricolage, pasting together this and that and are in general read only by the literati, whereas Browning wrote what amounted to popular novels in verse beginning with Pauline and Paracelsus, and continuing through Sordello and The Ring and the Book.   

    Perhaps the easiest avenue of approach to Browning is to look at a poem that was once a parlor favorite, read aloud in middle class homes, and then studied in schools, before falling into neglect, “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.”  The basis for the poem’s popularity is clear.  Its appeal is largely on its surface, in the jangling rhymes and the insistent beat of anapestic horse-hooves.  The poem’s dominant effect is in its sound which recalls the pleasures of nursery rhymes, and perhaps for some present-day readers, early experiences with Noyes’ “The Highwayman” or the likes of Vachel Lindsay and Robert Service.  In such a poem the reader is entitled to forget about meaning. 

     Indeed, there is little to grasp beyond the music of the verse.  The poem lacks the nationalistic motive of Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which shares its thumping tetrameters.  Browning noted that he had had no historic event in mind (which has not stopped scholars from making suggestions).  The speaker is characterized only by his energetic and dutiful riding; even in the triumphant conclusion he steps aside to yield the spotlight to Roland, the faithful horse.  Likewise, the other riders, Dirk and Joris, are without specific qualities.  Their progress is marked by the names of towns which, while they make a plausible route for the reader who chooses to investigate, are not described at all.   The action proceeds by couplets with virtually no enjambement (when one line syntactically flows into the next).  Browning’s stanza divisions seem artificial and unnecessary.  One need only sit back and enjoy the ride, reading aloud if possible, even alone in a room.  Here is one part of the foundation of poetry: the melodies of words, beautiful for their own sake. 

     Such sound effects govern also Browning’s retelling of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” likely to be familiar to American readers, even those who are unaware of the author’s name.    

 

      Rats!

They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,

   And bit the babies in the cradles,

And eat the cheeses out of the vats,

   And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles,

Split open the kegs of salted sprats,

Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,

And even spoiled the women's chats

      By drowning their speaking

      With shrieking and squeaking

In fifty different sharps and flats.

 

These lines are not only musical; they also include concrete detail to fully create the scene while ending in a witty final line.  This sounds like a song from a Broadway show, but the cleverness of “light verse” has lost respect these days and barely survives in the literary scene. 

     The form most closely identified with Browning is the dramatic monologue.  A persona, often historical, but always clearly distinguished from the author, speaks.  The form is suited to oral performance and allows for as much subtle and complex characterization as a first-person short story.  Browning’s most popular poem of this sort is “My Last Duchess.”  The tone is altogether different from “How They Brought the Good News.”  Browning uses couplets here as well, but rather than the more rapid tetrameters, he lengthens the line a foot into longer, more thoughtful pentameters, often enjambed to create a tone of thoughtful musing.

     Much like a dramatic speech in a play or conversation in a short story in verse, Browning’s Duke of Ferrara is characterized by his own words.  The language situates the reader in the exotic environment of Renaissance Italy, celebrated for artistic achievement but also the scene of murderous intrigues.  While showing his home to a relation of his new fiancée, the duke’s arrogance emerges unmistakably and the reader (and perhaps the new in-law) realizes that he killed his “last duchess.”  With rich irony, the duke describes how, despite his condescension in making her the “gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name,” she persisted in expressing “a heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad,” exciting his proud jealousy.  The experience of reading the poem consists in the reader’s catching one hint after another of the speaker’s narcissism and his violent potential and thrilling with the mounting implications of danger (similar perhaps to the pleasure of watching an Alfred Hitchcock Presents television show).

      The Ring and the Book, on the other hand, at some twenty thousand lines, more resembles a Masterpiece Theater series, and we may imagine Browning’s admirers binge-reading another sensational Italian Renaissance story.  His expansive retelling from multiple points of view (a technique used by a good many Victorian novelists – familiar examples include Stoker’s Dracula and Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) -- is primarily a murder mystery, but, at the conclusion, he reflects on the unique power of art.  

  

So, British Public, who may like me yet,

(Marry and amen!) learn one lesson hence

Of many which whatever lives should teach:

This lesson, that our human speech is naught,

Our human testimony false, our fame

And human estimation words and wind.

Why take the artistic way to prove so much?

Because, it is the glory and good of Art,

That Art remains the one way possible

Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least.

How look a brother in the face and say

“Thy right is wrong, eyes hast thou yet art blind,

“Thine ears are stuffed and stopped, despite their length,

“And, oh, the foolishness thou countest faith!”

Say this as silverly as tongue can troll—

The anger of the man may be endured,

The shrug, the disappointed eyes of him

Are not so bad to bear—but here’s the plague

That all this trouble comes of telling truth,

Which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false,

Seems to be just the thing it would supplant,

Nor recognisable by whom it left—

While falsehood would have done the work of truth.

But Art, —wherein man nowise speaks to men,

Only to mankind, — Art may tell a truth

Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,

Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.

So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,

Beyond mere imagery on the wall, —

So, note by note, bring music from your mind,

Deeper than ever the Andante dived, —

So write a book shall mean, beyond the facts,

Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.

                             (The Ring and the Book 831-863) 

 

     For Browning art was the means to intersubjectivity, a verbal technology that can accurately reflect individual vision while making one mind accessible to others.  Browning had been attacked for obscurity, leading him to write to a friend that while “I never designedly tried to puzzle people,” he also “never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar, or a game of dominoes, to an idle man.”  Here he considers the likely response to teaching the “British Public” a “lesson, that our human speech is naught,/ Our human testimony false, our fame/ And human estimation words and wind.”  Thus he uses words to demonstrate that words are inherently and necessarily misleading, and his words are sufficiently artful that the reader accepts a proposition that might be rejected if stated as an outright claim.  Though Browning thinks he possesses the truth, in order to pass it on, he must disguise it, and working “obliquely,” reach a reader who would never be otherwise receptive. 

     The poet never doubts that he has access to a reality “Deeper than ever the Andante dived” with the power not only to bring the reader beauty (“suffice the eye”) but also truth (“save the soul beside”).  Many of his readers came to agree, and Browning did live to enjoy the reputation of a sage.  In his later years, Browning was considered an important thinker as well as a great poet.  In his own lifetime the Browning Society of London was organized to study and discuss his work and within twenty years, hundreds of such groups were meeting.

     Many even of those who do not read poetry have heard of Browning’s relationship to his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as a great love story, and, unlike many literary men, he was, by all appearances, both passionate and monogamous.   Her sonnets (such as “How do I love thee?/ Let me count the ways.”) seem likewise to be that rare sort of love poem that celebrates marital joy.  Many have taken the opening words in her husband’s “Rabbi ben Ezra” -- “Grow old along with me!/ The best is yet to be”) – in the same way.  Though Browning is best known for long narrative poems, for dramatic monologues, and the quality of his thought, he was sometimes moved by a pure lyric impulse inspired by love.

 

            Meeting at Night

 

I

The grey sea and the long black land;

And the yellow half-moon large and low;

And the startled little waves that leap

In from their sleep,

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,

And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

 

II

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,

Than the two hearts beating each to each!

      The darkness heightens the sense of intimacy as the speaker crosses a living ocean where waves are “fiery ringlets” to an imagination lit by the expectation of love.  The reader need hardly to be inclined to Freudian analysis to find the details suggestive as the boat’s prow pushes on through water and sand on the way over a “warm sea-scented beach” to an erotic encounter.  The actual encounter is suggested by vivid yet oblique detail: a tap, a scratch, a match, a low voice, our greatest pleasures are represented implicit in by these things more powerfully than by a direct description of love-making.  After these indirections, the concluding line has all the more power with its simple and straightforward celebration.

     Robert Browning may remind the modern reader of the central role poets held not so long ago in English-speaking society.  For millions Browning was an entertainer, the author of best-sellers which people read aloud in small gatherings for their amusement and which were widely discussed in the popular press.  Like grand opera and great novels but also like street ballads, tv mini-series, and country music, his works concerned sex and violence, sometimes presented almost luridly.  Yet his readers also looked to him for wisdom, and the fruits of his thought were considered to be authenticated by his poetic skill, as though a writer is necessarily expert in any topic other than writing.  Poets do not generally occupy the foreground of cultural life in today’s America, but, while reading Browning’s work, one may play being a Victorian and discover if a poet may in the twenty-first century be yet at once a guru, a source of wisdom, and, at the same time, an entertainment, a pleasing way of passing the time.

     While some of Browning’s works are ponderously swollen and his syntax is at times tangled, in many of his well-known poems he is perfectly accessible and will strike even a modern as thoughtful and talented.  Though the popular stereotype depicts “the Victorian Age” as pompous and moralistic, a familiarity with Browning can usefully complicate the picture.  As a poet at a time when works of poetry were consumed by large general audiences, he was a star in a way impossible today. 

  

 Pied Piper

 

I

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;

‘Good speed!'’ cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;

‘Speed!’ echoed the wall to us galloping through;

Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,

And into the midnight we galloped abreast.

 

II

Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace

Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place;

I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,

Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,

Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,

Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit.

 

III

'Twas moonset at starting; but while we drew near

Lokeren, the cocks crew and twilight dawned clear;

At Boom, a great yellow star came out to see;

At Düffeld, 'twas morning as plain as could be;

And from Mecheln church-steeple we heard the half-chime,

So, Joris broke silence with, ‘Yet there is time!'’

 

IV

At Aershot, up leaped of a sudden the sun,

And against him the cattle stood black every one,

To stare through the mist at us galloping past,

And I saw my stout galloper Roland at last,

With resolute shoulders, each hutting away

The haze, as some bluff river headland its spray:

 

V

And his low head and crest, just one sharp ear bent back

For my voice, and the other pricked out on his track;

And one eye's black intelligence, - ever that glance

O'er its white edge at me, his own master, askance!

And the thick heavy spume-flakes which aye and anon

His fierce lips shook upwards in galloping on.

 

VI

By Hasselt, Dirck groaned; and cried Joris, ‘Stay spur!

Your Roos galloped bravely, the fault's not in her,

We'll remember at Aix’ - for one heard the quick wheeze

Of her chest, saw the stretched neck and staggering knees,

And sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank,

As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank.

 

VII

So, we were left galloping, Joris and I,

Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky;

The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh,

'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff;

Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white,

And ‘Gallop,’ gasped Joris, ‘for Aix is in sight!’

 

VIII

‘How they'll greet us!’ - and all in a moment his roan

Rolled neck and croup over, lay dead as a stone;

And there was my Roland to bear the whole weight

Of the news which alone could save Aix from her fate,

With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim,

And with circles of red for his eye-sockets' rim.

 

IX

Then I cast loose my buffcoat, each holster let fall,

Shook off both my jack-boots, let go belt and all,

Stood up in the stirrup, leaned, patted his ear,

Called my Roland his pet-name, my horse without peer;

Clapped my hands, laughed and sang, any noise, bad or good,

Till at length into Aix Roland galloped and stood.

 

X

And all I remember is - friends flocking round

As I sat with his head 'twixt my knees on the ground;

And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine,

As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine,

Which (the burgesses voted by common consent)

Was no more than his due who brought good news from Ghent.

 

 

My Last Duchess (originally titled “Italy”)

 Ferrara

 

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not

Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps

Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace—all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech—which I have not—to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—

E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretense

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

Enoch Arden as Popular Literature

 

 

     In his own day, the prestige of Alfred, Lord Tennyson was immense.  He was the longest-serving Poet Laureate in British history and to many embodied Victorian values in his very skillful, high-minded, and stately works.  A reviewer spoke for a great many, critics as well as the general population, when in the middle of the poet’s career he declared unreservedly “We have no great living poet but Alfred Tennyson.” [1]  His reputation remained potent enough that my generation still read Idylls of the King in junior high where a common curriculum made it many American students’ first substantial poetic text (as well as, perhaps, for many their last). 

     In the 1860s Tennyson was clearly the most prominent of British poets, and Enoch Arden was one of his most popular works, selling 17,000 copies on the day of publication and over 60,000 the first year.  Fancy illustrated gift editions and translations then appeared, both authorized and pirated. [2]  A reviewer hailed the poem as “the most popular poem since the days of Byron.” [3]  The initial review in the New York Times put the author’s name in all capitals, lauding “TENNYSON” as “the poet of the age, whose song reflects faithfully the movement, the intellectual tendencies, the moral conflict, and all that goes to make up the complex sum of our civilization.” [4]  a recent scholar notes that in America editions of Enoch Arden ”were too numerous and their sale too rapid for accurate recording.” [5]

  The poem’s appeal persisted.  In 1897 Richard Strauss wrote a piano composition to be performed along with a dramatic reading of the poem, indicating the poem’s success among Continental readers. [6]   Three stage versions and four silent movie treatments were produced, including a 1922 version by D. W. Griffith. 

     Yet in the marketplace of literature Tennyson’s stock was falling.  Already in 1926 a judicious critic noted “Tennyson pre-eminently represents Victorian literature, a privilege which to-day is in the eyes of many one of his shortcomings.” [6]  Literary judgments of Tennyson’s reputation had dramatically slumped, with writers leading critics in revising their parents’ literary judgement.  Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, for instance, dismissed the poet, remarking, "Tennyson a poet? Why, he’s only a rhymester," [7] and in Ulysses he is called “Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet.” [8]  Hardy’s late (1922) poem “An Ancient to Ancients” describes the decay of the laureate’s appeal mercilessly yet with a powerful sense of longing, nostalgia, and loss, noting that "The bower we shrined to Tennyson" . . ."is roof-wrecked . . "damps there drip upon/ Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust,/ The spider is sole denizen."    

                  The very reasons that made Enoch Arden so popular in its on day limited its long-term literary reputation.  There is no question of Tennyson’s skill and craft.  The greatest master of sound in English poetry since Pope, his melodies are regularly precise and satisfying.  The opening of Enoch Arden has sharp and well-formulated images, with a painterly depiction of the scene.  

                                               a hazelwood,

By autumn nutters haunted, flourishes

Green in a cuplike hollow of the down. 

This opening sketch concludes with the three principals as children making sand castles on the shore, an effective symbolic premonition of their ill-starred plans. 

     Soon, however, qualities emerge that might ultimately prove Tennyson’s aesthetic vulnerabilities.  The vigorous Enoch sometimes bests Philip in a fight, causing his friend to declare, “I hate you, Enoch!”  

                                                          at this

The little wife would weep for company,

And pray them not to quarrel for her sake,

And say she would be little wife to both. (33-36) 

This is surely by most any standards “twee.”  The “little” before “wife” insists on the already cloying cuteness even further.  Tennyson may be salvaged by admirers who could maintain that this prettiness is only a set-up for the cruel caricature that life makes of the “wife to both” notion, [9] but through the rest of the poem he consciously aims at highly-colored sentimental effects emphasizing the cute and the pathetic. 

     The reader of the poem’s latter scenes may think as Enoch wastes away in sickly virtue of Wilde’s well-known line “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” [10]  Wilde went for aphoristic reversals, but his play was rarely verbal alone.  He justifies his witticism elsewhere, noting “a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” [11]   

     From the start a taste for the sentimental found both ardent admirers and mockers.  The earliest citation of the word in the OED is from a 1749 letter which indicates both the term’s novelty and ambiguity, yet also indicates its vogue. "What, in your opinion,” Lady Bradshagel asked Samuel Richardson whose novels were thought to contain fine feelings indeed, “is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite...Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word...such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party; I have been taking a sentimental walk." [12]  Not only “everything clever and agreeable,” that is to say, what is socially attractive, but aesthetic and moral excellence as well were implied by eighteenth century notions of sensibility. [13]  A popular example, albeit using the term “sensibility” rather than “sentimentalism,” indicates the claims of the partisans of feeling.

 

Sweet Sensibility! Thou keen delight!

Thou hasty moral! Sudden sense of right!

Thou untaught goodness! Virtue's precious seed!

Thou sweet precursor of the gen'rous deed!

[14] 

In his History of England (1771) Oliver Goldsmith noted the “refinements” brought to Britain through Roman occupation, but noted “They were only incapable of sentimental pleasure” [15] as though that were the crowning attribute of a sophisticated society. 

     Yet from the time of its birth, the eighteenth-century concept of the “sentimental” also attracted satirists.  Whereas Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) popularized a hero whose sensibilities and the sympathetic bonds with others they inspire form the basis for both a model of a harmonious society and a genuine individual moral virtue, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) is decidedly more ambivalent.  Yorick is often absurd and misguided when he feels uplifted by lofty sentiments.  In 1784 a poet pointedly associated “mischief” with “your dying sentimentals,” [16] referring to the habit of fainting by men and women of sensitivity in novels and, apparently, in person.  An anonymous Veronese painting from 1750 depicts “A Lady Fainting During a Party.”  So many fictional protagonists were prone to such incidents that Jane Austen in her juvenile novel Love and Freindship [sic] (1790), imitating but also reacting against Samuel Richardson, a character prudently provides advice to another: “Beware of swoon, dear Laura . . . Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint.”

     In 1797 Coleridge published a set of sonnets attributed to Nehemiah Higginbottom satirizing the vogue of sensibility, what he called in Biographia Literaria “the spirit of doleful egotism.” [17]  The appeal of sentiment was not in fact vanishing, though.  It was probably increasing, becoming perhaps less prominent among poets and the upper reaches of the beau-monde but more popular among the less well-to-do and less educated.  As late as 1899 an article in a popular magazine celebrated "The Decay of Sensibility" but demonstrated its persistence as well by saying “the modern young woman does not swoon promiscuously.”  She no longer “at the slightest shock shuts up into a pink, formless pulp.” [18]

     Fainting, however, was just one of the more dramatic representations of vulnerability to feelings.  Though in Enoch Arden no one faints, it seems to the modern taste far too sentimental.  Sentimentality describes excessive emotion (clearly a matter subject to taste and judgement) or the unseemly enjoyment of the spectacle of a character’s emotions unjustified by sufficient artistic or thematic role.   

        But “excessive” and “unseemly” are value judgements from which the masses may dissent.  Sentimentality has always been popular because of its simplicity.  It is straightforward, unambiguous, luxurious, and easily understood.  Charles Cary Rumsey’s sculpture of a “Dying Indian” is sentimental because it invites the viewer to feel a sweet sadness about the displacement of native Americans “free of charge” to use the imagery of Wilde and Joyce, that is, in a reductive and facile view. [19]  Similarly Enoch Arden posits an unusual hero.  While most heroes exemplify characteristics prized in their culture and inspire people to imitation, Enoch is specifically meant to elicit strong emotions in the sensitive reader by his passive submission.  The reader’s pleasure is directly inspired by Enoch’s suffering. 

     Though all overdone pathos might be in questionable taste, the poem’s climactic focus on death in the nearly hagiographical Enoch Arden heightens Tennyson’s aesthetic risk, though it clearly increases as well his demands on the reader’s sentiment.  Such pleasures do not suit the modern taste.  Even those who relish the works of Edgar Allen Poe are likely to hesitate before his celebrated dictum declaring the death of a beautiful woman “the most poetical topic in the world.”  “Beauty,” Poe continues, “of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.”

     The emotional appeal to the picturesque, the sentimental, the easy laugh or tear is part of what allows a work to be popular.  It must be assimilable at first scan, avoiding the complexities of character in works considered “high art.”  A parallel relation exists between the themes of popular art and “high” art.   Popular works, including orally transmitted material and commercial popular art of either “folk” or mass culture provenance tend necessarily to reinforce received ideas, reassuring the audience of the correctness of the community’s consensus, transmitting values to the young, celebrating a culture’s (or subculture’s) values.  In contrast, elite, academic, and learned art is likely to point out the lapses or contradictions of social and intellectual norms, to challenge readers’ expectations, and to develop innovative forms.  Such poetry foregrounds ambiguities, ambivalences, contradictions, and mysteries, causing readers to question what is accepted.  

     Tennyson wishes to approve the institution of faithful marriage, yet the life of an honest and hard-working fisherman would, however desirable in a citizen, have little to recommend it to a reader.  A harmonious marriage, though it be a practical and moral ideal, would make an uneventful love story.  How many pop songs celebrate a happy marriage?  Tennyson seeks to regain the excitement that he loses by being so proper by exaggerating his emotional scenes and indulging in overdone pathos, in a word, by his practice of sentimentalism.

     He also, for all the Crabbe-like “realism” of the setting [21], did not hesitate to include unlikely, all-but-fairytale elements. Enoch’s prolonged disappearance as a castaway, his glimpse of the domestic scene of Annie and Philip, and his subsequent wasting away, all the while unknown to the happy couple need not be plausible. Their goal is to render possible not the happy ending so common in popular art, but the more intense option, a lugubrious one, lifted to sublimity by affording Enoch the opportunity to act with wholly selfless great-heartedness. He pauses then beyond the virtue of the monogamous spouse to the altruism of the saintly. This extreme, while it exalts the hero, removes him safely from the realm of daily lived experience. 

     The poem’s concluding lines have been a subject of considerable discussion. 

            And when they buried him the little port

Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.

 The contrast between Philip’s affluence and Enoch’s poverty had been a theme from the start.   Enoch only went to sea in order to provide for his family, though his more sensitive wife could see the ominous future.  Part of his reluctance to disturb Annie and Philip upon his return is because they have such a comfortable and secure life.  Just as Philip had had to bear the cost of educating Enoch’s children, so he also pays for Enoch’s funeral.  We resist the assumption that a lavish ceremony is something grand and good.  But there can be little doubt that for Tennyson the line was straightforward. The expenditure was a tribute to the “brave heroic soul” who had passed away.  The laureate unquestioningly participates in bourgeois values, improving his chances of a large readership but damaging his name among the cognoscenti.

     Unsurprisingly, some recent critics has sought to rehabilitate “Enoch Arden,” not by the intriguing route of recovering sentimentalism itself, but by pointing to the fissures and contradictions in his text as evidence of irony in order to make the tale acceptable to moderns. [22]   Both approaches are likely fruitful.  Just as other genres from the early Chinese novel to American comic strip art, once ignored by the literati, have received fruitful attention, as we have become more accepting of outsider art, the camp, and the kitsch, perhaps the sentimental is due for a re-evaluation.  Yet wherever one assigns value, whatever one’s taste, the generic characteristics of the popular and the sophisticated will remain distinct, each pursuing different goals by the most appropriate methods.  The very qualities that made Enoch Arden a roaring success with some audiences have also made it wholly ignored or disdained in others. 

 

 

 1.     The North American Review (vol. 100, p. 305) notes the publication of illustrated editions which “meet the demand of the general public for ornamental books which may serve as pretty gifts.”

 2.      The Union Review, vol. 3 (1865), p. 132.

 3.      New York Times, August 10, 1864.  The writer went continued, “Readers full of strong sympathetic admiration trace in TENNYSON the poet of the age, whose song reflects faithfully the movement, the intellectual tendencies, the moral conflict, and all that goes to make up the complex sum of our civilization.”

 4.      In 1962 Strauss’ Enoch Arden was recorded by Claude Rains and Glenn Gould and, the following year, received a Grammy nomination in the category of Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording. in 1962.

 5.      Norman Page, “Tennyson’s Sense of an Ending: the Problem of ‘Enoch Arden’,” Tennyson Research Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 3 (November 2014), pp. 219-235.

 6.      Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian. A History of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent.  1169.

 7.      A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, chapter 2.

 8.      Ulysses, 3.492.  Lawn tennis was considered a particularly genteel game.  The satirical nickname for Tennyson had been used in Punch and other humor magazines since the 1870s, so by Joyce’s time even the humor must have had a musty air about it. 

 9.      Indeed, the processes of taste are dynamic.  Since the seminal work by Susan Sontag in Notes on “Camp,” many have sought to recover the aesthetic value by revaluing rejected materials, sometimes with humorous or ironic intent.  To mention only a few phenomena among many, see Odd Nerdrum’s theory of kitsch, scan James Parker “The Twee Revolution,” in the Atlantic, July-August 2014, or survey the pervasive Japanese fascination with what they call kawaii. 

 10.   Ada Leverson, Letters to the Sphinx.  Wilde, who claimed to prefer Disraeli’s novels, doubtless envied Dickens’ immense popularity.

 11.   De profundis.

 12.   Lady Bradshagel (Balfour) to Samuel Richardson, published in his Correspondance (1804) IV. 282.  See also Allen Sprague, “The Date of Sentimental and its Derivatives,” PMLA vol. 48 (1933), 303-307.

 13.   See, for instance, Adam Smith’s The Theory Of Moral Sentiments.

 14.   Lines 337–340 of Hannah More’s “Sensibility: An Epistle to the Honourable Mrs. Boscawen.”  More was a prominent social reformer and religious thinker as well as being a poet, playwright, and a leading Bluestocking.

 15.   Oliver Goldsmith, History of England, 28.

 16.   Unfortunate Sensibility; or the Life of Mrs. L-, Written by herself. In a Series of sentimental Letters, dedicated to Mr. Yorick in the Elysian Fields. 2 Vols. 6s. Richardson and Urquhart.

 17.   Ch. 1.  Coleridge makers it clear that he was parodying himself as well as Southey, Lamb, and Lloyd.

18.   The Cornhill Magazine, July 1899.

 19.   Rumsey’s work is from the first decade of the twentieth century.  A good many similar works were produced, among them “The Wounded Indian” (anonymous 1848), Ferdinand Pettrich’s “The Dying Tecumseh” (1856), and Thomas Crawford’s “The Dying Chief” (1875).  The stricken Indian shares with the cheerful Black jockey hitching posts an utterly non-threatening view of the Other.

 20.   “The Philosophy of Composition,” Graham’s Magazine, vol. XXVIII, no. 4, April 1846.

 21.   One of Tennyson’s influences was Crabbe’s “The Parting Hour.”

 22.   See, for instance, James R. Kincaid, Tennyson’s Major Poems: the Comic and Ironic Pattern.  Kincaid describes the ironic view, but then adds, “Everyone recognizes, though, that this is a wild misreading.”