Critics cannot in general be too punctilious in their respect for an
incognito. If an author intended us to know his name, he would put
it on his title-page. If he does not choose to do that, we have no
more right to pry into his secret than we have to discuss his family
affairs or open his letters. But every rule has its exceptional
cases; and the book which stands first upon our list is surely such.
All the world, somehow or other, knows the author. His name has been
mentioned unhesitatingly by several reviews already, whether from
private information, or from the certainty which every well-read
person must feel that there is but one man in England possessed at
once of poetic talent and artistic experience sufficient for so noble
a creation. We hope, therefore, that we shall not be considered
impertinent if we ignore an incognito which all England has ignored
before us, and attribute "In Memoriam" to the pen of the author of
"The Princess."
Such a course will probably be the more useful one to our readers;
for this last work of our only living great poet seems to us at once
the culmination of all his efforts and the key to many difficulties
in his former writings. Heaven forbid that we should say that it
completes the circle of his powers. On the contrary, it gives us
hope of broader effort in new fields of thought and forms of art.
But it brings the development of his Muse and of his Creed to a
positive and definite point. It enables us to claim one who has been
hitherto regarded as belonging to a merely speculative and peirastic
school as the willing and deliberate champion of vital Christianity,
and of an orthodoxy the more sincere because it has worked upward
through the abyss of doubt; the more mighty for good because it
justifies and consecrates the aesthetics and the philosophy of the
present age. We are sure, moreover, that the author, whatever right
reasons he may have had for concealing his own name, would have no
quarrel against us for alluding to it, were he aware of the idolatry
with which every utterance of his is regarded by the cultivated young
men of our day, especially at the universities, and of the infinite
service of which this "In Memoriam" may be to them, if they are
taught by it that their superiors are not ashamed of faith, and that
they will rise instead of falling, fulfil instead of denying the
cravings of their hearts and intellects, if they will pass upwards
with their teacher from the vague though noble expectations of
"Locksley Hall," to the assured and everlasting facts of the proem to
"In Memoriam"--in our eyes the noblest Christian poem which England
has produced for two centuries.
To explain our meaning, it will be necessary, perhaps, to go back to
Mr. Tennyson's earlier writings, of which he is said to be somewhat
ashamed now--a fastidiousness with which we will not quarrel; for it
should be the rule of the poet, forgetting those things which are
behind, to press on to those things which are before, and "to count
not himself to have apprehended but--" no, we will not finish the
quotation; let the readers of "In Memoriam" finish it for themselves,
and see how, after all, the poet, if he would reach perfection, must
be found by Him who found St. Paul of old. In the meantime, as a
true poet must necessarily be in advance of his age, Mr. Tennyson's
earlier poems, rather than these latter ones, coincide with the
tastes and speculations of the young men of this day. And in
proportion, we believe, as they thoroughly appreciate the distinctive
peculiarities of those poems, will they be able to follow the author
of them on his upward path.
Some of our readers, we would fain hope, remember as an era in their
lives the first day on which they read those earlier poems; how,
fifteen years ago, Mariana in the Moated Grange, "The Dying Swan,"
"The Lady of Shalott," came to them as revelations. They seemed to
themselves to have found at last a poet who promised not only to
combine the cunning melody of Moore, the rich fulness of Keats, and
the simplicity of Wordsworth, but one who was introducing a method of
observing nature different from that of all the three and yet
succeeding in everything which they had attempted, often in vain.
Both Keats and Moore had an eye for the beauty which lay in trivial
and daily objects. But in both of them, there was a want of deep
religious reverence, which kept Moore playing gracefully upon the
surface of phenomena without ever daring to dive into their laws or
inner meaning; and made poor Keats fancy that he was rather to render
nature poetical by bespangling her with florid ornament, than simply
to confess that she was already, by the grace of God, far beyond the
need of his paint and gilding. Even Wordsworth himself had not full
faith in the great dicta which he laid down in his famous
Introductory Essay. Deep as was his conviction that nature bore upon
her simplest forms the finger-mark of God, he did not always dare
simply to describe her as she was, and leave her to reveal her own
mystery. We do not say this in depreciation of one who stands now
far above human praise or blame. The wonder is, not that Wordsworth
rose no higher, but that, considering the level on which his taste
was formed, he had power to rise to the height above his age which he
did attain. He did a mighty work. He has left the marks of his
teaching upon every poet who has written verses worth reading for the
last twenty years. The idea by which he conquered was, as Coleridge
well sets forth, the very one which, in its practical results on his
own poetry, procured him loud and deserved ridicule. This, which
will be the root idea of the whole poetry of this generation, was the
dignity of nature in all her manifestations, and not merely in those
which may happen to suit the fastidiousness or Manichaeism of any
particular age. He may have been at times fanatical on his idea, and
have misused it, till it became self-contradictory, because he could
not see the correlative truths which should have limited it. But it
is by fanatics, by men of one great thought, that great works are
done; and it is good for the time that a man arose in it of fearless
honesty enough to write Peter Bell and the Idiot Boy, to shake all
the old methods of nature-painting to their roots, and set every man
seriously to ask himself what he meant, or whether he meant anything
real, reverent, or honest, when he talked about "poetic diction," or
"the beauties of nature." And after all, like all fanatics,
Wordsworth was better than his own creed. As Coleridge thoroughly
shows in the second volume of the "Biographia Literaria," and as may
be seen nowhere more strikingly than in his grand posthumous work,
his noblest poems and noblest stanzas are those in which his true
poetic genius, unconsciously to himself, sets at naught his own
pseudo-naturalist dogmas.
Now Mr. Tennyson, while fully adopting Wordsworth's principle from
the very first, seemed by instinctive taste to have escaped the
snares which had proved too subtle both for Keats and Wordsworth.
Doubtless there are slight niaiseries, after the manner of both those
poets, in the first editions of his earlier poems. He seems, like
most other great artists, to have first tried imitations of various
styles which already existed, before he learnt the art of
incorporating them into his own, and learning from all his
predecessors, without losing his own individual peculiarities. But
there are descriptive passages in them also which neither Keats nor
Wordsworth could have written, combining the honest sensuous
observation which is common to them both, with a self-restrained
simplicity which Keats did not live long enough to attain, and a
stately and accurate melody, an earnest songfulness (to coin a word)
which Wordsworth seldom attained, and from his inaccurate and
uncertain ear, still seldomer preserved without the occurrence of a
jar or a rattle, a false quantity, a false rapture, or a bathos. And
above all, or rather beneath all--for we suspect that this has been
throughout the very secret of Mr. Tennyson's power--there was a hush
and a reverent awe, a sense of the mystery, the infinitude, the
awfulness, as well as of the mere beauty of wayside things, which
invested these poems as wholes with a peculiar richness, depth, and
majesty of tone, beside which both Keats's and Wordsworth's methods
of handling pastoral subjects looked like the colouring of Julio
Romano or Watteau by the side of Correggio or Titian.
This deep simple faith in the divineness of Nature as she appears,
which, in our eyes, is Mr. Tennyson's differentia, is really the
natural accompaniment of a quality at first sight its very opposite,
and for which he is often blamed by a prosaic world; namely, his
subjective and transcendental mysticism. It is the mystic, after
all, who will describe Nature most simply, because he sees most in
her; because he is most ready to believe that she will reveal to
others the same message which she has revealed to him. Men like
Behmen, Novalis, and Fourier, who can soar into the inner cloud-world
of man's spirit, even though they lose their way there, dazzled by
excess of wonder--men who, like Wordsworth, can give utterance to
such subtle anthropologic wisdom as the "Ode on the Intimations of
Immortality," will for that very reason most humbly and patiently
"consider the lilies of the field, how they grow." And even so it is
just because Mr. Tennyson is, far more than Wordsworth, mystical, and
what an ignorant and money-getting generation, idolatrous of mere
sensuous activity, calls "dreamy," that he has become the greatest
naturalistic poet which England has seen for several centuries. The
same faculty which enabled him to draw such subtle subjective
pictures of womanhood as Adeline, Isabel, and Eleanor, enabled him to
see, and therefore simply to describe, in one of the most distinctive
and successful of his earlier poems, how
The creeping mosses and clambering weeds,
And the willow branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,
And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marish flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among,
Were flooded over with eddying song.
No doubt there are in the earlier poems exceptions to this style--
attempts to adorn nature, and dazzle with a barbaric splendour akin
to that of Keats--as, for instance, in the "Recollections of the
Arabian Nights." But how cold and gaudy, in spite of individual
beauties, is that poem by the side of either of the Marianas, and
especially of the one in which the scenery is drawn, simply and
faithfully, from those counties which the world considers the
quintessence of the prosaic--the English fens.
Upon the middle of the night
Waking she heard the night-fowl crow;
The cock sang out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen's low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seemed to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.
* * * * *
About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blackened waters slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark,
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray,
Throughout all these exquisite lines occurs but one instance of what
the vulgar call "poetic diction." All is simple description, in
short and Saxon words, and yet who can deny the effect to be perfect-
-superior to any similar passage in Wordsworth? And why? Because
the passage quoted, and indeed the whole poem, is perfect in what
artists call tone--tone in the metre and in the sound of the words,
as well as in the images and the feelings expressed. The weariness,
the dreariness, the dark mysterious waste, exist alike within and
without, in the slow monotonous pace of the metre and the words, as
well as in the boundless fen, and the heart of her who, "without hope
of change, in sleep did seem to walk forlorn."
The same faith in Nature, the same instinctive correctness in melody,
springing from that correct insight into Nature, ran through the
poems inspired by medieval legends. The very spirit of the old
ballad writers, with their combinations of mysticism and objectivity,
their freedom from any self-conscious attempt at reflective epithets
or figures, runs through them all. We are never jarred in them, as
we are in all the attempts at ballad-writing and ballad-restoring
before Mr. Tennyson's time, by discordant touches of the reflective
in thought, the picturesque in Nature, or the theatric in action. To
illustrate our meaning, readers may remember the ballad of "Fair
Emmeline," in Bishop Percy's "Reliques." The bishop confesses, if we
mistake not, to have patched one end of the ballad. He need not have
informed us of that fact, while such lines as these following meet
our eyes:
The Baron turned aside,
And wiped away the rising tears
He proudly strove to hide.
No old ballad writer would have used such a complicated concetto.
Another, and even a worse instance is to be found in the difference
between the old and new versions of the grand ballad of "Glasgerion."
In the original, we hear how the elfin harper could
Harp fish out of the water,
And water out of a stone,
And milk out of a maiden's breast
That bairn had never none.