ABSTRACT
Pater’s urbane, patrician paganism places Browning and Tennyson, in 1867 and 1888 respectively, as established poets, but as poets of an older generation. However powerful, Browning’s ‘grotesque’ has nothing to do with the Hellenism of the 1860s: however scholarly, Tennyson’s language has nothing to do with the accounts of style prevalent by the 1880s, nothing to do with the art which aspires to the condition of music, with that world of pure form which organises the flood of random sounds, colours, incidents from the world without into a structure where form and content are interchangeable and where there is ‘but one’, unique word only commensurate with the artist’s understanding of what it is he wants to say.3 They are both tactfully classified as important but obsolete figures, one writing in the Grotesque manner and one the poet of the pure Type which has been forced to become eclectic and ornate, recognisable as Bagehot’s categories for these poets. Democratic and conservative poet alike are politely seen as obsolete. Tennyson’s Arthurian Idylls of the King, which appeared over the years 1859 to 1885, represents a society encumbered with custom and habit, struggling with a damaging mind/body split which determines its culture and forms of thought; it is by no means irrelevant to the situation of the late nineteenth century, but goes unnoticed by Pater. That Browning confronted Hellenism in poems such as Balaustion’s Adventure (1871), Aristophanes’ Apology (1875) and The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877), and continued to meditate on questions of sexuality, politics and volition in poems such as Fifine at the Fair (1872) and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), is not seen, either by Pater or the younger poets writing in the 1860s, to be immediately relevant to their work or concerns, however much they may have respected the older writers. Indeed, the work of Tennyson and Browning in the latter part of the century could be seen as a reaction to that of younger poets, which suggests that they were no longer originating debate, and that the centre of interest lay elsewhere. Their work was displaced by different problems. Just as Darwin’s work had discredited the Type, they are seen as part of an older formation.
