Poetry in the late nineteenth centuryJacobinism, Jacquerie: the names are meant to chill the blood. The Irish,
those unruly Celts, were becoming increasingly violent in their demands for
Home Rule. (In 1882 the so-called Phoenix Park murders occurred in
Dublin where the Secretary to Ireland Lord Frederick Cavendish and the
Under-Secretary T.H. Burke were assassinated by militants.) Jacobins were
the most radical element of the French Revolution of 1789, and "Jacquerie"
was the term given to French peasants who rebelled against the nobility in
- In 1886 rebellion was again in the air, spread by the modern
contagion of city life (although agricultural depression was also a feature of
the decade).
The city in particular not only permits but also makes an inescapable
hell-on-earth. In a similar vein, science - which in "Locksley Hall" looked
as if it was the promised redeemer - has turned into the false Messiah:
Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
There among the glooming alleys Progress halts on palsied feet,
Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street.
There the Master scrimps his haggard sempstress of her daily bread,
There a single sordid attic holds the living and the dead.
There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
And the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of the poor. (217-24)
Tennyson's cast of mind, which is essentially that of a fatalistic Tory, makes
sure that his preference is for country ways: "Plowmen, Shepherds, have I
found, and more than once, and still could find, / Sons of God, and kings of
men in utter nobleness of mind" (121-22). It is equally inevitable that he
should regard contemporary mores revealed in the estates of art and letters
with abhorrence:
Authors - essayist, atheist, novelist, realist, rhymester, play your part,
Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art.
Rip your brothers' vices open, strip your own foul passion bare;
Down with Reticence, down with Reverence - forward - naked - let them stare.
Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of your sewer;
Send the drain into the fountain, lest the stream should issue pure.
Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the trough of Zolaism, -
Forward, forward, ay and backward, downward too into the abysm.
(139-46)
This attack on what would soon become known as "the Decadence"
might on the face of it seem more of the moment than Tennyson's discovery
of urban misery. Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt," that famously
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