Review of Johnson's The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry

Robert Kibler

Professor Peterson

19th Cent Readings

The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry, published in 1951 by E.D.H. Johnson, explores the double awareness he finds inherent in the poetry of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold. Contending with a materialistic, utilitarian, and sensation oriented audience, Johson posits, each of these poets adjusted their work so as to maintain their poetic responsibility of communication, of involvement in their own times. To do so meant a certain sacrificing of what might best be called poetic integrity. But Johnson effectively shows that the three poets, singled out for their influence on Victorian society, each maintained an individual sense of his own creative fount as well, one quite alien to the clubby predilections of the times.

The literary works of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold abound with distress, or malaise due to a contradiction between the individual poet's isolated vision of beauty, and his responsibility to an industrialized, utilitarian, scientifically advancing state. Experiencing this stress, Johnson relates, each of them popularized and thereby compromised their art to gain an audience. Hence the tag of blasphemy with which these names, especially Tennyson, were signalled by later writers and critics. To exhonerate the three, Johnson looks at their early poems to show the native inclinations of their creative minds.

In works such as The Mystic, for instance, Tennyson expresses, as Johnson puts it, " a...mood...disposed to repudiate the world and to seek immunity from its disturbances in the depths of his own imaginative being." Such a disposition clearly lacks the externality required by his contemporary readership. Though much early Tennyson, such as The Two Voices, affirms the living codes of a Victorian mentality, the undercurrents of isolation, doubt, vision, intuitive dream, and psychological imbalance displayed in his 1830 volume, for instance, embodies what Johnson calls Tennyson's "mystic double vision," one that never disappears as Tennyson's work progresses through midcentury and fame.

This mystic underside, as it were, engages in a dynamic poesy more in keeping with later literary movements than the overt thematics of Tennyson's work would alone allow. Thus, poems such as Maude and Locksely Hall anticipate later Freudian approaches to character, as does The Lady of Shallott present a precursory version of Gautier's or Pater's aesthetic movement. The use of symbolism in Maude and A Vision of Sin, for example, not only preludes Mallarme, but allows Tennyson, even if unaware, to explore the "vivid sense impressions" accompanying conditions of eroticism, of the macabre, of the grotesque, or of societal imbalance, that would be unacceptable to his audience if presented outright.

Further, Johnson shows the structural consistency of works such as The Arabian Nights, operating centripetally, to revolve "the encircling play of circumstances, ones active, temporal, and external, round an "inner, timeless, and fixed core of apprehension" that in effect expresses both the relationship and paradox with which each of these victorian poets had to struggle. For their creative sourcing demanded a solitary dialectic with the muse, but they were called upon as poets to be the prophetic ministers to a populace which seemingly thought very little of the muse, and even less of solitary man.

Browning's early work also acts as a sort of prototype, or springboard for the dilemma of his double vision. Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello all express, one way or another, the conflict between the individual, reflective artist and the corruptive plurality of human circumstance. While each of these early pieces ends with the thematic notion that the artist can never achieve selfrealization without, as Johnson says, "getting into productive communication with the external world," Browning had a difficult time implementing such a theory within the frame of his own work. That is to say, Browning's work tends to be both psychological and selfexpressive by nature, no matter how objectified his narrative modes. Seen within the contemporary context then, it is easy to understand why John Stuart Mill's criticism of the author of Pauline, stating that he had never seen a "more intense and morbid self consciousness...in any sane human being," was taken so to heart by Browning. It was in many ways the penultimate Utilitarian anathematization.

As a result of such criticism, feeling the heat, if you will, of failing to communicate, Browning began experimenting stylistically to develop a more objective and external manner. Thus, Paracelsus employs the dramatic form to present the spiritual biography, and Sordello, forsaking the more objective dramatic for the narrative, shows signs nonetheless, of employing what Browning calls "an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis," though the work was substantially revised. Yet what emerges out of these experiments, as Johnson points out, is a Browning stumbling over the relative conflict of selfidealism with the corruption inherent in the outside world. Thus the tension resulting from trying to fulfill the double vision mission shows in the apprehensive way in which he handles his objectifying stylistic experiments. He writes an introductory note in Paraclesus, for instance, attempting to explain to his small readership that his objective dramatic style in the work was not really that at all, but was rather an experiment in presenting character and event through the "phenomena of the mind." Yet for all his insistence, the work is a drama, and not the poem he would have his audience believe. Clearly such a compelling need to wrangle out a suitable definition shows an artist uneasy with what Johnson intimates is the pinch of compromise, the yoke of an externalized age infringing on Browning's penchant for the internalized mind. It appears then, that the intuitive character of Browning's and Tennyson's artistic truth, internally operative, could neither readily adapt to the desires, nor easily understand how to minister to such an age. Yet it had to try and do so.

The expedient for Browning was a change of artistic environment. He turned to the stage to further his attempts at securing a larger audience. Yet, here again, his native propensity for exploring internalized psyche worked against him. For "the poet," Johnson says, "simply could not translate states of mind into the language of external conflict." Thus, theatrically boring plays such as Strafford failed to entreat a popular following. As a result, Browning drew back, becoming indifferent to the crowd, and expressed a determination not to write for production anymore. His ensuing work clearly showed the original internalized conflicts between "innate idealism," and the tempting material corruption of the external world. For a time, his stylistic excersizes, conducted somewhat outside the pale of popular reproach, effectively worked toward finding the link between what Johnson calls Browning's "primitive vitalism" and the materialized spirit of midcentury.

If Browning had his "primitive vitalism," and Tennyson his "mystical double vision" internally sinecured, Arnold, having neither, was at least deeply vested with a need to protect his self possession, his ideal harmony. He was convinced, as Johnson puts it, that "the temper of Victorian society was destructive of individual integrity and wholeness of being." His dissatisfaction with both artistic alienation and materialistic society converted his literary career into a sort of intellectual, objective quest for spiritual and aesthetic solvency. Wanting objectivity, guidance, and a means of communication, Arnold's vision came to embrace both classical myth and Aristotelian literary doctrine as a means of securing an insular poetic from a corruptive society. Simultaneously, he desired to change that society through the new poetic.

"Homeless in the Victorian age," as Johnson puts it, Arnold early on sought refuge in a Romantic "acceptance of resignation." This is evident in the Marguerite poems, for example. While exhalting alienation however, they also detail the poet's dilemma of having to choose between a worldly love and an alienated existence, between the ascetism demanded by the muse, and the palpable life at hand. The poems show that not even love can bridge the two separate realms. Yet Arnold the poet is compelled to build one. Even if he maintains to the last, as Johnson says, a "curiously classical fatalism," the poet and the man both feel a desire for society. But while Dover Beach and The Buried Life each suggest that the speaker has a lover present, a sense of joyless connection prevails, one misshapen by the age and kept irretreivably from unity. Further,The Buried Life, all but seals the speaker's mind into a tomblike refuge, a deeply guarded inner sanctum reminiscent of Tennyson's Palace of Art. Considering that poems such as Parting and In Harmony With Nature effectively separate man from a Wordsworthian natural supernaturalism, and that a neverquite Christian spirituality runs through all of Arnold's work, Johnson shows the true breadth of Arnold's alien vision to flush out substantially. As well, his letters to friend Clough indicate a disdain for the type compromise he saw extant in Browning's, Keats', and Tennyson's work one he felt immune to.

Such alienation, however, came into conflict both with Arnold's societive needs, and the artist's urge urge to minister a reprobate humanity. Poems such as Human Life, and Euphrosyne, for instance, examine loneliness and man's craving for affection. As well, those non descript lovers in Dover Beach and The Buried Life example a sort of psychically irreducible presence that Arnold, even more than Tennyson and Browning it seems, both needed and courted. Neither could the Romantic alienation of the Marguerite poems, nor a later stoicism, nor the negative resignation of Empedocles, quell the call to mingle lone creative powers with the epochal Zeitgeist. But for all that, and despite the ennobling classical design put forth in his 1853 Preface, Arnold could still little accomodate his age. Expressed generally, such is the dilemma of all three poets, for their inability to provide a sustained connection with their world, despite their efforts, proves to be the keystone of Johnson's case for the double vision.

For Tennyson, The Idylls of the King was the text wherein the merger of creative self and societal expectations cavorted in high feather. While its chivalric setting, its heavy handed overlay of moral, and a plotline based on quest appealed to his audience, Tennyson found lots of elbow room for his own mystic vision. Camelot, as Johnson notes, is a sort of Palace of Art that exists half in and half out of concrete perceptability. It is rumoured to have been built by magic, or by music. The symbolic usage of mist and shadow throughout the work suggest misgivings the knights have about the grail quest, and about the Christian plan Aurthur imposed on them, one similar, by the way, to that which his audience imposed on the more spiritually ambivalent Tennyson. And yet, the sympatico struck between artist and audience in The Idylls disappears in Tennyson's later poems, intimating the great strain is must have been to conjoin the two in the first place. After 1870, a split in vision occurs, and Tennyson confines mystical content for the most part to the lesser bulk of his work, while the rest continues to court an audience. Crossover occurs predominantly in the form of the quest, the plot strategy most linking Tennyson to his age. It is clear, however, that he never casts off his sense of the inner awareness. He just seems to have let off trying to integrate his inner truth with the public's requirements.

Browning discovered that an old criminal trial was the perfect forum wherein to portray internal mental states, his desire to deliver moral, intuitional prescription to society, and the sensational melodrama and moral fervor craved by his audience. The Ring and the Book works both within and without of the Victorian ethic. Murder, adultery, family relationships, religious interweavings, tragedy, and the morally just outcome for Guido, provides the so relished details in an objectively stylized dramatic monologue form. Simultaneously, Browning's use of intuitional psychology and of symbols to maneuver Pompilia's actions, unbeknownst to her, expresses what Johnson shows to be "variances of theme [that] are still subsumed under one enormous antithesis between conscious intellect and unconscious intuition." But Browning too, fell away from the synthesis of vision achieved in The Ring and the Book, quite possibly, Johnson suggests, because his fame, as well as that of the others, was based more on the elements of compromise inherent in his work, than on the ones rooted in each artist's sense of their creative, insular truths.

Being more analytical, Arnold developed his need for a synthesis of visions into the proposed guidelines of his 1853 Preface. There, he announced that art must interest, inspirit, rejoice, and "infuse delight" into the reader. His earlier work, culminantly represented in Empedocles, is thus deemed unworthy, being "calculated to depress rather than to exhilarate." New artistic intentions to communicate, to instill a "moral impression," to maintain objectivity, and to write so that the largest possible audience can participate, all play into the hands of a Victorian readership. But the further reliance on classicism to counteract the "spiritual discomfort" of the age is seen by Johnson as rooted in Arnold's own need for guidance and his own desire for wholeness, neither of which he is able to achieve, despite his plan. Quite simply, Arnold subverts both the objectivity and classical design outlined in his 1853 Preface. Unable to trust his narrative, for example, he interjects authorial opinion into Tristram and Iseult, going so far as to show his personal indignation at the sordid character of Tristram. In Merope, he displays what Johnson calls the "romantic inversion of the classical device of recognition." According to Aristotle, who uses a classic version of Merope to highlight the technique of recognition, that device is necessary for the development of catharsis. To withold it, as does Arnold, exhalts alienation. It is ironic that Arnold, the closest of the three to his age, had the least success in meeting them. His switch to prose and criticism, we can surmise, signalled a poetic defeat.

So seen, Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold deserve a more positive assessment than had been granted them by later critics. If not, their "alien vision" leastways calls for a refiguring of the substantive character of Victorian times relative to that vision. Johnson allows for such in his conclusion, indicating that the explanation for their popularity is traceable to what must be seen as an inadmissable but present Victorian self infatuation, one mingled in with distorted 20th century concepts of the age. As well, he acknowledges that the Victorians were probably more receptive to poetic subtleties than is imagined.

But for the nonce, setting self infatuation and poetic sensibilities aside, Johnson's vague mention of these 20th century distortions shows the area in which his analysis is lacking. Of course, if there is a lack, it must be admitted that his show of the alien poetic vision, opens the door to newer perceptions, to clarifications, that naturally overcome it. To the degree Johnson interrogated 1951 sensibilities to Victorian society, and to these poets, finding that sensibility lacking, he helped breech the perception, and thereby the judgement, which his contemporaries put to that age. And such a breech can only be repaired with further questioning. This sounds antithetical to a charge of limits. But history always needs distance to clear its eyes, to objectify its perceptions, and without fail, new questions spring up, new opinions are formed. We add our bits, subtract our nickels, and the interrogation moves on. Then we are history, to be questioned in kind, relationally. Johnson's questions, to which his work is the answer, wondered how to salvage these poets for a mid twentieth century audience that saw them as connected to a time whose characteristic superficiality and unruffled, jingoistic calls to action were seen as precipitating factors for two world wars. As his interrogations naturally sought answers relational to his time, they do not properly conceptualize or anticipate our own, but they allow for them. And though the midtwentieth century is also part of the "age of anxiety," their relationship to Victorian England wanted to blame. We have the objectivity that they did not. For Johnson, the task was to make his age rethink their judgements, to give these poets a worthy chance. We outdate him with our questions, ones weaned on television, space explorations, politically inflicted wars of our own making, cybernetics, and test tube babies. And so we ask whether a nineteenth century England, dislocated from its rural habitat, overwhelmed by industrial and tchnological intrusions, made definable by utilitarian special functions, and left bereft of God by inductive science, can be considered by any measure as unruffled. Could it be, then, that the people at large, inexplicably caught in the wheels of acute change, wanted a host of poets who were caught in the same dilemma, specifically so that they could reject the inner, solitudinal vision in the same way that their own was rejected? Bards then, as projected sacrificial lambs? Or did their readership secretly covet the inner vision, while daily life demanded a superficiality to cover a chronic horror, a dread of the times? Both possibilities, as examples, are conceivably true in a way which Johnson, in 1951, could not be fully aware, relationally aware. Simply put then, he must be seen as having a dated perspective, as having gathered a little dust. It is a prevalent offense, and to his credit, it might be said that he successfully furthered that process along.