turns up, but very rarely. We agree with all Professor Jebb says in
praise of Tennyson’s blank verse.
“He has known,” says he, “how to modulate it to every theme, and to
elicit a music appropriate to each; attuning it in turn to a tender and
homely grace, as in ‘The Gardener’s Daughter ‘; to the severe and ideal
majesty of the antique, as in ‘Tithonus’; to meditative thought, as in
‘The Ancient Sage,’ or ‘Akbar’s Dream’; to pathetic or tragic tales of
contemporary life, as in ‘Aylmer’s Field,’ or ‘Enoch Arden’; or to
sustained romance narrative, as in the ‘Idylls.’ No English poet has
used blank verse with such flexible variety, or drawn from it so large a
compass of tones; nor has any maintained it so equably on a high level of
excellence.”
But we fail to see where he touched Shakespeare on the dramatic side of
Shakespeare’s immense genius.
Tennyson had the yearning common to all English poets to write
Shakespearean plays, and the filial piety with which his son tries to
uphold his father’s claims as a dramatist is beautiful; indeed, it is
pathetic. But the greatest injustice that can be done to a great poet is
to claim for him honours that do not belong to him. In his own line
Tennyson is supreme, and this book makes it necessary to ask once more
what that line is. Shakespeare’s stupendous fame has for centuries been
the candle into which all the various coloured wings of later days have
flown with more or less of disaster. Though much was said in praise of
‘Harold’ by one of the most accomplished critics and scholars of our
time, Dr. Jebb, {168} the play could not keep the stage, nor does it live
as a drama as any one of Tennyson’s lyrics can be said to live.
‘Becket,’ to be sure, was a success on the stage. A letter to Tennyson
in 1884 from so competent a student of Shakespeare as Sir Henry Irving
declares that ‘Becket’ is a finer play than ‘King John.’ Still, the
‘Morte d’Arthur,’ ‘The Lotos-Eaters,’ ‘The Gardener’s Daughter,’ outweigh
the five-act tragedy in the world of literary art. Of acted drama
Tennyson knew nothing at all. To him, evidently, the word _act_ in a
printed play meant _chapter_; the word _scene_ meant _section_. In his
early days he had gone occasionally to see a play, and in 1875 he went to
see Irving in Hamlet and liked him better than Macready, whom he had seen
in the part. Still later he went to see Lady Archibald Campbell act when
‘Becket’ was given “among the glades of oak and fern in the Canizzaro
Wood at Wimbledon.” But handicapped as he was by ignorance of drama as a
stage product how could he write Shakespearean plays?
But let us for a moment consider the difference between the two men as
poets. It is hard to imagine the master-dramatist of the world—it is
hard to imagine the poet who, by setting his foot upon allegory, saved
our poetry from drying up after the invasion of gongorism, euphuism, and
allegory—it is, we say, hard to imagine Shakespeare, if he had conceived
and written such lovely episodes as those of the ‘Idylls of the King,’ so
full of concrete pictures, setting about to turn his flesh-and-blood
characters into symbolic abstractions. There is in these volumes a
curious document, a memorandum of Tennyson’s presented to Mr. Knowles at
Aldworth in 1869, in which an elaborate scheme for turning into abstract
ideas the characters of the Arthurian story is sketched:—
K.A. Religious Faith.
King Arthur’s three Guineveres.
The Lady of the Lake.
Two Guineveres, ye first prim Christianity. 2d Roman Catholicism: ye
first is put away and dwells apart, 2d Guinevere flies. Arthur takes
to the first again, but finds her changed by lapse of Time.
Modred, the sceptical understanding. He pulls Guinevere, Arthur’s
latest wife, from the throne.
Merlin Emrys, the Enchanter. Science. Marries his daughter to
Modred.
Excalibur, War.
The Sea, the people / The Saxons, the people } the S. are a
sea-people and it is theirs and a type of them.
The Round Table: liberal institutions.
Battle of Camlan.
2d Guinevere with the enchanted book and cup.