Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
But on the other hand we must recollect that very long ago, when the
apparition of invasion from across the Channel had as yet spoiled no
man's slumbers, Mr. Tennyson's blood was already up:[2]--
For the French, the Pope may shrive them ...
And the merry devil drive them
Through the water and the fire.
[2] "Poems chiefly Lyrical," 1830, p. 142.
And unhappily in the beginning of "Maud," when still in the best use of
such wits as he possesses, its hero deals largely in kindred
extravagances (p. 7):--
When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee,
And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones,
Is it peace or war? better war! loud war by land and by sea,
War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones.
He then anticipates that, upon an enemy's attacking this country, "the
smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogue," who typifies the bulk of the British
people, "the nation of shopkeepers," as it has been emasculated and
corrupted by excess of peace, will leap from his counter and till to
charge the enemy; and thus it is to be reasonably hoped that we shall
attain to the effectual renovation of society.
We frankly own that our divining rod does not enable us to say whether
the poet intends to be in any and what degree sponsor to these
sentiments, or whether he has put them forth in the exercise of his
undoubted right to make vivid and suggestive representations of even the
partial and narrow aspects of some endangered truth. This is at best,
indeed, a perilous business, for out of such fervid partial
representations nearly all grave human error springs; and it should only
be pursued with caution and in season. But we do not recollect that 1855
was a season of serious danger from a mania for peace and its pursuits;
and even if it had been so, we fear that the passages we have quoted far
overpass all the bounds of moderation and good sense. It is, indeed,
true that peace has its moral perils and temptations for degenerate man,
as has every other blessing, without exception, that he can receive from
the hand of God. It is moreover not less true that, amidst the clash of
arms, the noblest forms of character may be reared, and the highest acts
of duty done; that these great and precious results may be due to war as
their cause; and that one high form of sentiment in particular, the love
of country, receives a powerful and general stimulus from the bloody
strife. But this is as the furious cruelty of Pharaoh made place for the
benign virtue of his daughter; as the butchering sentence of Herod
raised without doubt many a mother's love into heroic sublimity; as
plague, as famine, as fire, as flood, as every curse and every scourge
that is wielded by an angry Providence for the chastisement of man, is
an appointed instrument for tempering human souls in the seven-times
heated furnace of affliction, up to the standard of angelic and
archangelic virtue. War, indeed, has the property of exciting much
generous and noble feeling on a large scale; but with this special
recommendation it has, in its modern forms especially, peculiar and
unequalled evils. As it has a wider sweep of desolating power than the
rest, so it has the peculiar quality that it is more susceptible of
being decked in gaudy trappings, and of fascinating the imagination of
those whose passions it inflames. But it is on this very account a
perilous delusion to teach that war is a cure for moral evil in any
other sense than as the sister tribulations are. The eulogies of the
frantic hero in "Maud," however, deviate into grosser folly. It is
natural that such vagaries should overlook the fixed laws of Providence;
and under these laws the mass of mankind is composed of men, women, and
children who can but just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness; whose
whole ideas of Mammon-worship are comprised in the search for their
daily food, clothing, shelter, fuel; whom any casualty reduces to
positive want; and whose already low estimate is yet further lowered and
ground down when "the blood-red blossom of war flames with its heart of
fire." But what is a little strange is, that war should be recommended
as a specific for the particular evil of Mammon-worship. Such it never
was, even in the days when the Greek heroes longed for the booty of
Troy, and anticipated lying by the wives of its princes and its
citizens. Still it had, in times now gone by, ennobling elements and
tendencies of the less sordid kind. But one inevitable characteristic of
modern war is, that it is associated throughout, in all its particulars,
with a vast and most irregular formation of commercial enterprise. There
is no incentive to Mammon-worship so remarkable as that which it
affords. The political economy of war is now one of its most commanding
aspects. Every farthing, with the smallest exceptions conceivable, of
the scores or hundreds of millions which a war may cost, goes directly
to stimulate production, though it is intended ultimately for waste or
for destruction. Apart from the fact that war destroys every rule of
public thrift, and saps honesty itself in the use of the public treasure
for which it makes such unbounded calls, it therefore is the greatest
feeder of that lust of gold which we are told is the essence of
commerce, though we had hoped it was only its occasional besetting sin.
It is, however, more than this; for the regular commerce of peace is
tameness itself compared with the gambling spirit which war, through the
rapid shiftings and high prices which it brings, always introduces into
trade. In its moral operation it more resembles, perhaps, the finding of
a new gold-field, than anything else. Meantime, as the most wicked
mothers do not kill their offspring from a taste for the practice in the
abstract, but under the pressure of want, and as war always brings home
want to a larger circle of the people than feel it in peace, we ask the
hero of "Maud" to let us know whether war is more likely to reduce or to
multiply the horrors which he denounces? Will more babies be poisoned
amidst comparative ease and plenty, or when, as before the fall of
Napoleon, provisions were twice as dear as they now are, and wages not
much more than half as high? Romans and Carthaginians were pretty much
given to war: but no nations were more sedulous in the cult of Mammon.
Again, the Scriptures are pretty strong against Mammon-worship, but they
do not recommend this original and peculiar cure. Nay, once more: what
sad errors must have crept into the text of the prophet Isaiah when he
is made to desire that our swords shall be converted into ploughshares,
and our spears into pruning-hooks! But we have this solid consolation
after all, that Mr. Tennyson's war poetry is not comparable to his
poetry of peace. Indeed he is not here successful at all: the work, of a
lower order than his, demands the abrupt force and the lyric fire which
do not seem to be among his varied and brilliant gifts. We say more. Mr.
Tennyson is too intimately and essentially the poet of the nineteenth
century to separate himself from its leading characteristics, the
progress of physical science and a vast commercial, mechanical, and
industrial development. Whatever he may say or do in an occasional fit,
he cannot long either cross or lose its sympathies; for while he
elevates as well as adorns it, he is flesh of its flesh and bone of its
bone. We fondly believe it is his business to do much towards the
solution of that problem, so fearful from its magnitude, how to
harmonise this new draught of external power and activity with the old
and more mellow wine of faith, self devotion, loyalty, reverence, and
discipline. And all that we have said is aimed, not at Mr. Tennyson, but
at a lay-figure which he has set up, and into the mouth of which he has
put words that cannot be his words.
We return to our proper task, "Maud," if an unintelligible or even, for
Mr. Tennyson, an inferior work, is still a work which no inferior man
could have produced; nor would it be difficult to extract abundance of
lines, and even passages, obviously worthy of their author. And if this
poem would have made while alone a volume too light for his fame, the
defect is supplied by the minor pieces, some of which are admirable.
"The Brook," with its charming interstitial soliloquy, and the "Letters"
will, we are persuaded, always rank among Mr. Tennyson's happy efforts;
while the "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," written from the
heart and sealed by the conscience of the poet, is worthy of that great
and genuine piece of manhood, its immortal subject.
We must touch for a moment upon what has already been mentioned as a
separate subject of interest in the "Princess." We venture to describe
it as in substance a drama, with a plot imperfectly worked and with
characters insufficiently chiselled and relieved. Its author began by
presenting, and for many years continued to present, personal as well as
natural pictures of individual attitude or movement; and, as in "Oenone"
and "Godiva," he carried them to a very high pitch of perfection. But he
scarcely attempted, unless in his more homely narrations, anything like
grouping or combination. It now appears that for the higher effort he
has been gradually accumulating and preparing his resources. In the
sections of the prolonged soliloquy of "Maud" we see a crude attempt at
representing combined interests and characters with heroic elevation,
under the special difficulty of appearing, like Mathews, in one person
only; in the "Princess" we had a happier effort, though one that still
left more to be desired. Each, however, in its own stage was a
preparation for an enterprise at once bolder and more mature.
We now come to the recent work of the poet--the "Idylls of the King."
The field, which Mr. Tennyson has chosen for this his recent and far
greatest exploit, is one of so deep and wide-reaching an interest as to
demand some previous notice of a special kind.
Lofty example in comprehensive forms is, without doubt, one of the great
standing needs of our race. To this want it has been from the first one
main purpose of the highest poetry to answer. The quest of Beauty leads
all those who engage in it to the ideal or normal man as the summit of
attainable excellence. By no arbitrary choice, but in obedience to
unchanging laws, the painter and the sculptor must found their art upon
the study of the human form, and must reckon its successful reproduction
as their noblest and most consummate exploit. The concern of Poetry with
corporal beauty is, though important, yet secondary: this art uses form
as an auxiliary, as a subordinate though proper part in the delineation
of mind and character, of which it is appointed to be a visible organ.
But with mind and character themselves lies the highest occupation of
the Muse. Homer, the patriarch of poets, has founded his two immortal
works upon two of these ideal developments in Achilles and Ulysses; and
has adorned them with others, such as Penelope and Helen, Hector and
Diomed, every one an immortal product, though as compared with the
others either less consummate or less conspicuous. Though deformed by
the mire of after-tradition, all the great characters of Homer have
become models and standards, each in its own kind, for what was, or was
supposed to be, its distinguishing gift.
At length, after many generations and great revolutions of mind and of
events, another age arrived, like, if not equal, in creative power to
that of Homer. The Gospel had given to the whole life of man a real
resurrection, and its second birth was followed by its second youth.
This rejuvenescence was allotted to those wonderful centuries which
popular ignorance confounds with the dark ages properly so called--an
identification about as rational as if we were to compare the life
within the womb to the life of intelligent though early childhood.
Awakened to aspirations at once fresh and ancient, the mind of man took
hold of the venerable ideals bequeathed to us by the Greeks as a
precious part of its inheritance, and gave them again to the light,
appropriated but also renewed. The old materials came forth, but not
alone; for the types which human genius had formerly conceived were now
submitted to the transfiguring action of a law from on high. Nature
herself prompted the effort to bring the old patterns of worldly
excellence and greatness--or rather the copies of those patterns still
legible, though depraved, and still rich with living suggestion--into
harmony with that higher Pattern, once seen by the eyes and handled by
the hands of men, and faithfully delineated in the Gospels for the
profit of all generations. The life of our Saviour, in its external
aspect, was that of a teacher. It was in principle a model for all, but
it left space and scope for adaptations to the lay life of Christians in
general, such as those by whom the every-day business of the world is to
be carried on. It remained for man to make his best endeavour to exhibit
the great model on its terrestrial side, in its contact with the world.
Here is the true source of that new and noble cycle which the middle
ages have handed down to us in duality of form, but with a nearly
identical substance, under the royal sceptres of Arthur in England and
of Charlemagne in France.
Of the two great systems of Romance, one has Lancelot, the other has
Orlando for its culminating point; these heroes being exhibited as the
respective specimens in whose characters the fullest development of man,
such as he was then conceived, was to be recognised. The one put forward
Arthur for the visible head of Christendom, signifying and asserting its
social unity; the other had Charlemagne. Each arrays about the Sovereign
a fellowship of knights. In them Valour is the servant of Honour; in an
age of which violence is the besetting danger, the protection of the
weak is elevated into a first principle of action; and they betoken an
order of things in which Force should be only known as allied with
Virtue, while they historically foreshadow the magnificent aristocracy
of mediaeval Europe. The one had Guinevere for the rarest gem of beauty,
the other had Angelica. Each of them contained figures of approximation
to the knightly model, and in each these figures, though on the whole
secondary, yet in certain aspects surpassed it: such were Sir Tristram,
Sir Galahad, Sir Lamoracke, Sir Gawain, Sir Geraint, in the Arthurian
cycle; Rinaldo and Ruggiero, with others, in the Carlovingian. They were
not twin systems, but they were rather twin investitures of the same
scheme of ideals and feelings. Their consanguinity to the primitive
Homeric types is proved by a multitude of analogies of character and by
the commanding place which they assign to Hector as the flower of human
excellence. Without doubt, this preference was founded on his supposed
moral superiority to all his fellows in Homer; and the secondary prizes
of strength, valour, and the like, were naturally allowed to group
themselves around what, under the Christian scheme, had become the
primary ornament of man. The near relation of the two cycles to one
another may be sufficiently seen in the leading references we have made,
and it runs into a multitude of details both great and small, of which
we can only note a few. In both the chief hero passes through a
prolonged term of madness. Judas, in the College of Apostles, is
represented under Charlemagne in Gano di Maganza and his house, who
appear, without any development in action, in the Arthurian romance as
"the traitours of Magouns," and who are likewise reflected in Sir
Modred, Sir Agravain, and others; while the Mahometan element, which has
a natural place ready made in a history that acknowledges Charlemagne
and France, for its centres, finds its way sympathetically into one
which is bound for the most part by the shores of Albion. Both schemes
cling to the tradition of the unity of the Empire as well as of
Christendom; and accordingly, what was historical in Charlemagne is
represented in the case of Arthur by an imaginary conquest reaching as
far as Rome, the capital of the West: even the sword _Durindana_ has its
counterpart in the sword _Excalibur_.
The moral systems of the two cycles are essentially allied: and perhaps
the differences between them may be due in greater or in less part to
the fact that they come to us through different _media_. We of the
nineteenth century read the Carlovingian romance in the pages of Ariosto
and Bojardo, who gave to their materials the colour of their times, and
of a civilization rank in some respects, while still unripe in some
others. The genius of poetry was not at the same period applying its
transmuting force to the Romance of the Round Table. The date of Sir
Thomas Mallory, who lived under Edward IV, is something earlier than
that of the great Italian romances; he appears, too, to have been on the
whole content with the humble offices of a compiler and a chronicler,
and we may conceive that his spirit and diction are still older than his
date. The consequence is, that we are brought into more immediate and
fresher contact with the original forms of this romance. So that, as
they present themselves to us, the Carlovingian cycle is the child of
the latest middle age, while the Arthurian represents the earlier. Much
might be said on the differences which have thus arisen, and on those
which may be due to a more northern and more southern extraction
respectively. Suffice it to say that the Romance of the Round Table, far
less vivid and brilliant, far ruder as a work of skill and art, has more
of the innocence, the emotion, the transparency, the inconsistency of
childhood. Its political action is less specifically Christian than that
of the rival scheme, its individual more so. It is more directly and
seriously aimed at the perfection of man. It is more free from gloss and
varnish; it tells its own tale with more entire simplicity. The ascetic
element is more strongly, and at the same time more quaintly, developed.
It has a higher conception of the nature of woman; and like the Homeric
poems, appears to eschew exhibiting her perfections in alliance with
warlike force and exploits. So also love, while largely infused into the
story, is more subordinate to the exhibition of other qualities. Again,
the Romance of the Round Table bears witness to a more distinct and
keener sense of sin: and on the whole, a deeper, broader, and more manly
view of human character, life, and duty. It is in effect more like what
the Carlovingian cycle might have been had Dante moulded it. It hardly
needs to be added that it is more mythical, inasmuch as Arthur of the
Round Table is a personage, we fear, wholly doubtful, though not
impossible; while the broad back of the historic Charlemagne, like
another Atlas, may well sustain a world of mythical accretions. This
slight comparison, be it remarked, refers exclusively to what may be
termed the latest "redactions" of the two cycles of romance. Their early
forms, in the lays of troubadours, and in the pages of the oldest
chroniclers, offer a subject of profound interest, and one still
unexhausted, although it has been examined by Mr. Panizzi and M.
Fauriel,[1] but one which is quite beyond the scope of our present
subject.
[1] Essay on the Romantic Narrative Poetry of the Italians: London,
1830. Histoire de la Poésie Provençale: Paris, 1846.
It is to this rich repository that Mr. Tennyson has resorted for his
material. He has shown, as we think, rare judgment in the choice. The
Arthurian Romance has every recommendation that should win its way to
the homage of a great poet. It is national: it is Christian. It is also
human in the largest and deepest sense; and, therefore, though highly
national, it is universal; for it rests upon those depths and breadths
of our nature to which all its truly great developments in all nations
are alike essentially and closely related. The distance is enough for
atmosphere, not too much for detail; enough for romance, not too much
for sympathy. A poet of the nineteenth century, the Laureate has adopted
characters, incidents, and even language in the main, instead of
attempting to project them on a basis of his own in the region of
illimitable fancy. But he has done much more than this. Evidently by
reading and by deep meditation, as well as by sheer force of genius, he
has penetrated himself down to the very core of his being, with all that
is deepest and best in the spirit of the time, or the representation,
with which he deals; and as others, using old materials, have been free
to alter them in the sense of vulgarity or licence, so he has claimed
and used the right to sever and recombine, to enlarge, retrench, and
modify, for the purposes at once of a more powerful and elaborate art
than his original presents, and of a yet more elevated, or at least of a
far more sustained, ethical and Christian strain.
We are rather disposed to quarrel with the title of Idylls: for no
diminutive ([Greek: _eidullion_]) can be adequate to the breadth,
vigour, and majesty which belong to the subjects, as well as to the
execution, of the volume. The poet used the name once before; but he
then applied it to pieces generally small in the scale of their
delineations, whereas these, even if broken away one from the other, are
yet like the disjoined figures from the pediment of the Parthenon in
their dignity and force. One indeed among Mr. Tennyson's merits is, that
he does not think it necessary to keep himself aloft by artificial
effort, but undulates with his matter, and flies high or low as it
requires. But even in the humblest parts of these poems--as where the
little Novice describes the miniature sorrows and discipline of
childhood--the whole receives its tone from an atmosphere which is
heroic, and which, even in its extremest simplicity, by no means parts
company with grandeur, or ceases to shine in the reflected light of the
surrounding objects. Following the example which the poet has set us in
a former volume, we would fain have been permitted, at least
provisionally, to call these Idylls by the name of Books. Term them what
we may, there are four of them--arranged, as we think, in an ascending
scale.
The simplicity and grace of the principal character in Enid, with which
the volume opens, touches, but does not too strongly agitate, the deeper
springs of feeling. She is the beautiful daughter of Earl Yniol, who, by
his refusal of a turbulent neighbour as a suitor, has drawn upon himself
the ruin of his fortunes, and is visited in his depressed condition by
(p. 1)--
The brave Geraint, a knight of Arthur's court,
A tributary prince of Devon, one
Of that great order of the Table Round....
Geraint wins her against the detested cousin. They wed, and she becomes
the purest gem of the court of Guinevere, her place in which is
described in the beautiful exordium of the poem. An accident, slight
perhaps for the weight it is made to carry, arouses his jealousy, and he
tries her severely by isolation and rude offices on one of his tours;
but her gentleness, purity, and patience are proof against all, and we
part from the pair in a full and happy reconciliation, which is
described in lines of a beauty that leaves nothing to be desired.
The treatment of Enid by her husband has appeared to some of Mr.
Tennyson's readers to be unnatural. It is no doubt both in itself
repulsive, and foreign to our age and country. But the brutal element in
man, which now only invades the conjugal relation in cases where it is
highly concentrated, was then far more widely diffused, and not yet
dissociated from alternations and even habits of attachment. Something
of what we now call Eastern manners at one time marked the treatment
even of the women of the West. Unnatural means contrary to nature,
irrespectively of time or place; but time and place explain and warrant
the treatment of Enid by Geraint.
Vivien, which follows Enid, is perhaps the least popular of the four
Books. No pleasure, we grant, can be felt from the character either of
the wily woman, between elf and fiend, or of the aged magician, whose
love is allowed to travel whither none of his esteem or regard can
follow it: and in reading this poem we miss the pleasure of those
profound moral harmonies, with which the rest are charged. But we must
not on these grounds proceed to the conclusion that the poet has in this
case been untrue to his aims. For he has neither failed in power, nor
has he led our sympathies astray; and if we ask why he should introduce
us to those we cannot love, there is something in the reply that Poetry,
the mirror of the world, cannot deal with its attractions only, but must
present some of its repulsions also, and avail herself of the powerful
assistance of its contrasts. The example of Homer, who allows Thersites
to thrust himself upon the scene in the debates of heroes, gives a
sanction to what reason and all experience teach, namely, the actual
force of negatives in heightening effect; and the gentle and noble
characters and beautiful combinations, which largely predominate in the
other poems, stand in far clearer and bolder relief when we perceive the
dark and baleful shadow of Vivien lowering from between them.
Vivien exhibits a well-sustained conflict between the wizard and, in
another sense, the witch; on one side is the wit of woman, on the other
are the endowments of the prophet and magician, at once more and less
than those of nature. She has heard from him of a charm, a charm of
"woven paces, and of waving hands," which paralyses its victim for ever
and without deliverance, and her object is to extract from him the
knowledge of it as a proof of some return for the fervid and boundless
love that she pretends. We cannot but estimate very highly the skill
with which Mr. Tennyson has secured to what seemed the weaker vessel the
ultimate mastery in the fight. Out of the eater comes forth meat. When
she seems to lose ground with him by her slander against the Round Table
which he loved, she recovers it by making him believe that she saw all
other men, "the knights, the Court, the King, dark in his light": and
when in answer to her imprecation on herself a fearful thunderbolt
descends and storm rages, then, nestling in his bosom, part in fear but
more in craft, she overcomes the last remnant of his resolution, wins
the secret she has so indefatigably wooed, and that instant uses it to
close in gloom the famous career of the over-mastered sage.
* * * * *
Nowhere could we more opportunely than at this point call attention to
Mr. Tennyson's extraordinary felicity and force in the use of metaphor
and simile. This gift appears to have grown with his years, alike in
abundance, truth, and grace. As the showers descend from heaven to
return to it in vapour, so Mr. Tennyson's loving observation of Nature,
and his Muse, seem to have had a compact of reciprocity well kept on
both sides. When he was young, and when "Oenone" was first published, he
almost boasted of putting a particular kind of grasshopper into Troas,
which, as he told us in a note, was probably not to be found there. It
is a small but yet an interesting and significant indication that, when
some years after he retouched the poem, he omitted the note, and
generalised the grasshopper. Whether we are right or not in taking this
for a sign of the movement of his mind, there can be no doubt that his
present use of figures is both the sign and the result of a reverence
for Nature alike active, intelligent, and refined. Sometimes applying
the metaphors of Art to Nature, he more frequently draws the materials
of his analogies from her unexhausted book, and, however often he may
call for some new and beautiful vehicle of illustration, she seems never
to withhold an answer. With regard to this particular and very critical
gift, it seems to us that he may challenge comparison with almost any
poet either of ancient or modern times. We have always been accustomed
to look upon Ariosto as one of the greatest among the masters of the art
of metaphor and simile; and it would be easy to quote from him instances
which in tenderness, grace, force, or all combined, can never be
surpassed. But we have rarely seen the power subjected to a greater
trial than in the passages just quoted from Mr. Tennyson, where metaphor
lies by metaphor as thick as shells upon their bed; yet each
individually with its outline as well drawn, its separateness as clear,
its form as true to nature, and with the most full and harmonious
contribution to the general effect.
* * * * *
Mr. Tennyson practises largely, and with an extraordinary skill and
power, the art of designed and limited repetitions. They bear a
considerable resemblance to those Homeric _formulae_ which have been so
usefully remarked by Colonel Mure--not the formulae of constant
recurrence, which tells us who spoke and who answered, but those which
are connected with pointing moral effects, and with ulterior purpose.
These repetitions tend at once to give more definite impressions of
character, and to make firmer and closer the whole tissue of the poem.
Thus, in the last speech of Guinevere, she echoes back, with other ideas
and expressions, the sentiment of Arthur's affection, which becomes in
her mouth sublime:--
I must not scorn myself: he loves me still:
Let no one dream but that he loves me still.
She prays admission among the nuns, that she may follow the pious and
peaceful tenor of their life (p. 260):--
And so wear out in almsdeed and in prayer
The sombre close of that voluptuous day
Which wrought the ruin of my lord the King.
And it is but a debt of justice to the Guinevere of the romancers to
observe, that she loses considerably by the marked transposition which
Mr. Tennyson has effected in the order of greatness between Lancelot and
Arthur. With him there is an original error in her estimate,
independently of the breach of a positive and sacred obligation. She
prefers the inferior man; and this preference implies a rooted ethical
defect in her nature. In the romance of Sir T. Mallory the preference
she gives to Lancelot would have been signally just, had she been free
to choose. For Lancelot is of an indescribable grandeur; but the limit
of Arthur's character is thus shown in certain words that he uses, and
that Lancelot never could have spoken. "Much more I am sorrier for my
good knight's loss than for the loss of my queen; for queens might I
have enough, but, such a fellowship of good knights shall never be
together in company."
We began with the exordium of this great work: we must not withhold the
conclusion. We left her praying admission to the convent--
She said. They took her to themselves; and she,
Still hoping, fearing, "is it yet too late?"
Dwelt with them, till in time their Abbess died.
Then she, for her good deeds and her pure life,
And for the power of ministration in her,
And likewise for the high rank she had borne,
Was chosen Abbess: there, an Abbess, lived
For three brief years; and there, an Abbess, pass'd
To where beyond these voices there is peace.
No one, we are persuaded, can read this poem without feeling, when it
ends, what may be termed the pangs of vacancy--of that void in heart and
mind for want of its continuance of which we are conscious when some
noble strain of music ceases, when some great work of Raphael passes
from the view, when we lose sight of some spot connected with high
associations, or when some transcendent character upon the page of
history disappears, and the withdrawal of it is like the withdrawal of
the vital air. We have followed the Guinevere of Mr. Tennyson through
its detail, and have extracted largely from its pages, and yet have not
a hope of having conveyed an idea of what it really is; still we have
thought that in this way we should do it the least injustice, and we are
also convinced that even what we have shown will tend to rouse an
appetite, and that any of our readers, who may not yet have been also
Mr. Tennyson's, will become more eager to learn and admire it at first
hand.
We have no doubt that Mr. Tennyson has carefully considered how far his
subject is capable of fulfilling the conditions of an epic structure.
The history of Arthur is not an epic as it stands, but neither was the
Cyclic song, of which the greatest of all epics, the "Iliad," handles a
part. The poem of Ariosto is scarcely an epic, nor is that of Bojardo;
but it is not this because each is too promiscuous and crowded in its
brilliant phantasmagoria to conform to the severe laws of that lofty and
inexorable class of poem? Though the Arthurian romance be no epic, it
does not follow that no epic can be made from out of it. It is grounded
in certain leading characters, men and women, conceived upon models of
extraordinary grandeur; and as the Laureate has evidently grasped the
genuine law which makes man and not the acts of man the base of epic
song, we should not be surprised were he hereafter to realize the great
achievement towards which he seems to be feeling his way. There is a
moral unity and a living relationship between the four poems before us,
and the first effort of 1842 as a fifth, which, though some considerable
part of their contents would necessarily rank as episode, establishes
the first and most essential condition of their cohesion. The
achievement of Vivien bears directly on the state of Arthur by
withdrawing his chief councillor--the brain, as Lancelot was the right
arm, of his court; the love of Elaine is directly associated with the
final catastrophe of the passion of Lancelot for Guinevere. Enid lies
somewhat further off the path, nor is it for profane feet to intrude
into the sanctuary, for reviewers to advise poets in these high matters;
but while we presume nothing, we do not despair of seeing Mr. Tennyson
achieve on the basis he has chosen the structure of a full-formed epic.
In any case we have a cheerful hope that, if he continues to advance
upon himself as he has advanced heretofore, nay, if he can keep the
level he has gained, such a work will be the greatest, and by far the
greatest poetical creation, that, whether in our own or in foreign
poetry, the nineteenth century has produced. In the face of all critics,
the Laureate of England has now reached a position which at once imposes
and instils respect. They are self-constituted; but he has won his way
through the long dedication of his manful energies, accepted and crowned
by deliberate, and, we rejoice to think, by continually growing, public
favour. He has after all, and it is not the least nor lowest item in his
praise, been the severest of his own critics, and has not been too proud
either to learn or to unlearn in the work of maturing his genius and
building up his fame.
From his very first appearance he has had the form and fashion of a true
poet: the insight into beauty, the perception of harmony, the faculty of
suggestion, the eye both in the physical and moral world for motion,
light, and colour, the sympathetic and close observation of nature, the
dominance of the constructive faculty, and that rare gift the thorough
mastery and loving use of his native tongue. Many of us, the common
crowd, made of the common clay, may be lovers of Nature, some as sincere
or even as ardent as Mr. Tennyson; but it does not follow that even
these favoured few possess the privilege that he enjoys. To them she
speaks through vague and indeterminate impressions: for him she has a
voice of the most delicate articulation; all her images to him are clear
and definite, and he translates them for us into that language of
suggestion, emphasis, and refined analogy which links the manifold to
the simple and the infinite to the finite. He accomplishes for us what
we should in vain attempt for ourselves, enables the puny hand to lay
hold on what is vast, and brings even coarseness of grasp into a real
contact with what is subtle and ethereal. His turn for metaphysical
analysis is closely associated with a deep ethical insight: and many of
his verses form sayings of so high a class that we trust they are
destined to form a permanent part of the household-words of England.
Considering the quantity of power that Mr. Tennyson can make available,
it is a great proof of self-discipline that he is not given to a wanton
or tyrannous use of it. An extraordinary master of diction, he has
confined himself to its severe and simple forms. In establishing this
rule of practice his natural gift has evidently been aided by the fine
English of the old romances, and we might count upon the fingers the
cases in which he has lately deviated into the employment of any stilted
phrase, or given sanction to a word not of the best fabric. Profuse in
the power of graphic[1] representation, he has chastened some of his
earlier groups of imagery, which were occasionally overloaded with
particulars; and in his later works, as has been well remarked, he has
shown himself thoroughly aware that in poetry half is greater than the
whole. That the chastity of style he has attained is not from exhaustion
of power may easily be shown. No poet has evinced a more despotic
mastery over intractable materials, or has been more successful in
clothing what is common with the dignity of his art. The Downs are not
the best subjects in the world for verse; but they will be remembered
with and by his descriptive line in the "Idylls"--
Far o'er the long backs of the bushless downs.
[1] We use the word in what we conceive to be its only legitimate
meaning; namely, after the manner and with the effect of painting.
It signifies the _quid_, not the _quale_.
How becoming is the appearance of what we familiarly term the "clod" in
the "Princess"! (p. 37)--
Nor those horn-handled breakers of the glebe.
Of all imaginable subjects, mathematics might seem the most hopeless to
make mention of in verse; but they are with him
The hard-grained Muses of the cube and square.
Thus at a single stroke he gives an image alike simple, true, and
poetical to boot, because suited to its place and object in his verse,
like the heavy Caryatides well placed in architecture. After this, we
may less esteem the feat by which in "Godiva" he describes the clock
striking mid-day:--
All at once,
With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon
Was clashed and hammered from a hundred towers.
But even the contents of a pigeon-pie are not beneath his notice, nor
yet beyond his powers of embellishment, in "Audley Court":--
A pasty, costly made,
Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay
Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks
Imbedded and injellied.
What excites more surprise is that he can, without any offence against
good taste, venture to deal with these contents even after they have
entered the mouth of the eater ("Enid," p. 79):--
The brawny spearman let his cheek
Bulge with the unswallowed piece, and turning, stared.
The delicate insight of fine taste appears to show him with wonderful
precision up to what point his art can control and compel his materials,
and from what point the materials are in hopeless rebellion and must be
let alone. So in the "Princess" (p. 89) we are introduced to--
Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men,
Huge women _blowzed_ with health, and wind, and rain,
And labour.
It was absolutely necessary for him to heighten, nay, to coarsen, the
description of these masses of animated beef, who formed the standing
army of the woman-commonwealth. Few would have obeyed this law without
violating another; but Mr. Tennyson saw that the verb was admissible,
while the adjective would have been intolerable.
In 1842 his purging process made it evident that he did not mean to
allow his faults or weaknesses to stint the growth and mar the
exhibition of his genius. When he published "In Memoriam" in 1850, all
readers were conscious of the progressive widening and strengthening,
but, above all, deepening of his mind. We cannot hesitate to mark the
present volume as exhibiting another forward and upward stride, and that
by perhaps the greatest of all, in his career. If we are required to
show cause for this opinion under any special head, we would at once
point to that which is, after all, the first among the poet's gifts--the
gift of conceiving and representing human character.
Mr. Tennyson's Arthurian essays continually suggest to us comparisons
not so much with any one poet as a whole, but rather with many or most
of the highest poets. The music and the just and pure modulation of his
verse carry us back not only to the fine ear of Shelley, but to Milton
and to Shakespeare: and his powers of fancy and of expression have
produced passages which, if they are excelled by that one transcendent
and ethereal poet of our nation whom we have last named, yet could have
been produced by no other English minstrel. Our author has a right to
regard his own blank verse as highly characteristic and original: but
yet Milton has contributed to its formation, and occasionally there is a
striking resemblance in turn and diction, while Mr. Tennyson is the more
idiomatic of the two. The chastity and moral elevation of this volume,
its essential and profound though not didactic Christianity, are such as
perhaps cannot be matched throughout the circle of English literature in
conjunction with an equal power: and such as to recall a pattern which
we know not whether Mr. Tennyson has studied, the celestial strain of
Dante.[1] This is the more remarkable, because he has had to tread upon
the ground which must have been slippery for any foot but his. We are
far from knowing that either Lancelot or Guinevere would have been safe
even for mature readers, were it not for the instinctive purity of his
mind and the high skill of his management. We do not know that in other
times they have had their noble victims, whose names have become
immortal as their own.
Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto
Di Lancilotto, e come amor lo strinse.
* * * * *
Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse.[2]
[1] It is no reproach to say that neither Dante nor Homer could have
been studied by Mr. Tennyson at the time--a very early period of his
life--when he wrote the lines which are allotted to them
respectively in "The Palace of Art."
[2] "Inferno," c. V, v. 127.
How difficult it is to sustain the elevation of such a subject, may be
seen in the well-meant and long popular "Jane Shore" of Rowe. How easily
this very theme may be vulgarised, is shown in the _"Chevaliers de la
Table Ronde"_ of M. Creuzé de Lesser, who nevertheless has aimed at a
peculiar delicacy of treatment.
But the grand poetical quality in which this volume gives to its author
a new rank and standing is the dramatic power: the power of drawing
character and of representing action. These faculties have not been
precocious in Mr. Tennyson: but what is more material, they have come
out in great force. He has always been fond of personal delineations,
from Claribel and Lilian down to his Ida, his Psyche, and his Maud; but
they have been of shadowy quality, doubtful as to flesh and blood, and
with eyes having little or no speculation in them. But he is far greater
and far better when he has, as he now has, a good raw material ready to
his hand, than when he draws only on the airy or chaotic regions of what
Carlyle calls unconditioned possibility. He is made not so much to
convert the moor into the field, as the field into the rich and gorgeous
garden. The imperfect _nisus_ which might be remarked in some former
works has at length reached the fulness of dramatic energy: in the
Idylls we have nothing vague or dreamy to complain of: everything lives
and moves, in the royal strength of nature: the fire of Prometheus has
fairly caught the clay: every figure stands clear, broad, and sharp
before us, as if it had sky for its background: and this of small as
well as great, for even the "little novice" is projected on the canvas
with the utmost truth and vigour, and with that admirable effect in
heightening the great figure of Guinevere, which Patroclus produces for
the character of Achilles, and (as some will have it) the modest
structure of Saint Margaret's for the giant proportions of Westminster
Abbey. And this, we repeat, is the crowning gift of the poet: the power
of conceiving and representing man.
We do not believe that a Milton--or, in other words, the writer of a
"Paradise Lost"--could ever be so great as a Shakespeare or a Homer,
because (setting aside all other questions) his chief characters are
neither human, nor can they be legitimately founded upon humanity; and,
moreover, what he has to represent of man is, by the very law of its
being, limited in scale and development. Here at least the saying is a
true one: _Antiquitas saeculi, juventus mundi;_ rendered by our poet in
"The Day-dream,"
For we are ancients of the earth,
And in the morning of the times.
The Adam and Eve of Paradise exhibit to us the first inception of our
race; and neither then, nor after their first sad lesson, could they
furnish those materials for representation, which their descendants have
accumulated in the school of their incessant and many-coloured, but on
the whole too gloomy, experience. To the long chapters of that
experience every generation of man makes its own addition. Again we ask
the aid of Mr. Tennyson in "Locksley Hall":--
Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.
The substitution of law for force has indeed altered the relations of
the strong and the weak; the hardening or cooling down of political
institutions and social traditions, the fixed and legal track instead of
the open pathless field, have removed or neutralised many of those
occasions and passages of life, which were formerly the schools of
individual character. The genius of mechanism has vied, in the arts of
both peace and war, with the strong hand, and has well-nigh robbed it of
its place. But let us not be deceived by that smoothness of superficies,
which the social prospect offers to the distant eye. Nearness dispels
the illusion; life is still as full of deep, of ecstatic, of harrowing
interests as it ever was. The heart of man still beats and bounds,
exults and suffers, from causes which are only less salient and
conspicuous because they are more mixed and diversified. It still
undergoes every phase of emotion, and even, as seems probable, with a
susceptibility which has increased and is increasing, and which has its
index and outer form in the growing delicacy and complexities of the
nervous system. Does any one believe that ever at any time there was a
greater number of deaths referable to that comprehensive cause a broken
heart? Let none fear that this age, or any coming one, will extinguish
the material of poetry. The more reasonable apprehension might be lest
it should sap the vital force necessary to handle that material, and
mould it into appropriate forms. To those especially, who cherish any
such apprehension, we recommend the perusal of this volume. Of it we
will say without fear, what we would not dare to say of any other recent
work; that of itself it raises the character and the hopes of the age
and the country which have produced it, and that its author, by his own
single strength, has made a sensible addition to the permanent wealth of
mankind.