Alfred Tennyson moves on his way through life heard, but by the public
unseen. We might put to him a question similar to that which
Wordsworth put to the cuckoo:--
"O blithe new-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee, and rejoice.
O Tennyson! art thou a man,
Or but a wandering voice?"
And our question would have like answer. That is, we should get just
as much from the man as Wordsworth got from the cuckoo. We should have
to look wise, and add--
"Even yet thou art to me
No man; but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery."
Many an admiring reader may have said with Solomon of old--"I sought
him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he answered me not."
If you want a popular poet, you generally know pretty well where to
look for him. In the first place, you may make certain that London
contains him. You may trace him to a coterie, probably a very
_recherché_ and exclusive one; you may look for him at midnight
in some hot and crowded drawing-room, surrounded by the fairest of
incense burners, and breathing volumes of ambrosial essences with a
very complacent air; you may find him as the great gun of a popular
periodical; you may meet him at Rogers's at breakfast; you may follow
him from one great dinner table to another, and at last to that of the
lord mayor. But in few or none of these places will you find Alfred
Tennyson. "He has gone down into his garden, to his beds of spices, to
feed in his garden and gather lilies." You may hear his voice, but
where is the man? He is wandering in some dream-land, beneath the
shade of old and charmed forests, by far-off shores, where
"All night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white:"
by the old milldam, thinking of the merry miller and his pretty
daughter; or is wandering over the open wolds, where
"Norland whirlwinds blow."
From all these places--from the silent corridor of an ancient convent;
from some shrine where a devoted knight recites his vows; from the
drear monotony of "the moated grange," or the ferny forest beneath the
"talking oak"--comes the voice of Tennyson, rich, dreamy, passionate,
yet not impatient; musical with the airs of chivalrous ages, yet
mingling in his song the theme and the spirit of those that are yet to
come.
The genius of Tennyson is essentially retiring, meditative, spiritual,
yet not metaphysical; ambitious only that itself, and not the man,
shall be seen, heard, and live. So that his song can steal forth;
catch by a faint but aerial prelude the ear quick to seize on the true
music of Olympus; and then, with growing and ever swelling symphonies,
still more ethereal, still fuller of wonder, love, and charmed woe,
can travel on amid the listening and spell-bound multitude, an
invisible spirit of melodious power, expanding, soaring aloft, sinking
deep, coming now as from the distant sea, and filling all the summer
air; so that it can thus triumph in its own celestial energy, the poet
himself would rather not be found. He seems to steal away under the
covert of friendly boughs; to be gone to caves and hiding crags, or to
follow the stream of the gray moorland, gathering
"From old well-heads of haunted rills,
And the heart of purple hills,
And shadowed caves of a sunny shore,
The choicest wealth of all the earth,
Jewel, or shell, or starry ore."
The orator may climb heights of most imperial influence over the
public mind, the statesman of power over the public destiny, the
merchant may gather stupendous wealth from every zone, the patriot
produce and carry on to success the most dazzling schemes for human
good: these disturb not the equanimity of Tennyson--the spirit of
poetry that is conferred on him he accepts as his fortune, his duty,
and his glory. In short, he has all that he can conceive of, or
desire. He knows that through that, his applauses, though less riotous
than those of the orator, will endure the longer; that he has in it a
commission to work with or against the statesman, as that man may be
good or evil; that even into the ear of the princeliest wealth he can
whisper a startling word of human counsel, or can move to deeds of
mercy; and that there is no patriot who can be more patriotic than him
whose voice, from day to day and year to year, is heard in the
stillest and most teachable hours of the most amply endowed and
teachable natures. Over all the faculties, the ranks, the influences
of human life, poetry maintains a suggestive and immortal supremacy,
for it becomes the more aspiring spirit of the age in the school and
the closet ere it comes forth upon the world. It mingles itself with
whatever is generous, ambitious, perceptive of greatness and of
virtue, and often speaks in the man in power by a deed of glorious
beneficence that falls like a blessing from heaven on the heart of
afflicted genius.
Of this profound and blessed reliance on the all-sufficiency of his
art, perhaps no poet ever furnished a more complete example than
Alfred Tennyson. There is nothing stirring, nothing restless, nothing
ambitious, in its tone; it has no freaks and eccentricities by which
it seeks to strike the public notice. There are no evidences of any
secret yet palpable artifices at work to urge it on, and thrust it
before you in magazines and reviews. Quiet in itself, it comes quietly
under your eye, naturally as the grass grows or the bird sings, and
you see, hear, and love it. From this absence of all bustle and parade
of introduction, or of the violence of attack upon it from the display
of prominent antagonist principles, political or theological, as in
the cases of Byron and Shelley, we are often surprised to find
Tennyson still wholly unread in quarters where poetry is read with
much avidity, and to hear others lamenting that he does not put forth
a poem more commensurate with his purely poetic temperament. But the
very nature of Tennyson's genius is to be contented with what it is.
It is happy in itself as the bird upon the bough. It is rolled into
itself, living and rejoicing in its own being and blessedness. It has
no deadly thirst for draughts of spirits from other worlds, no
feverish wrestlings for mere notoriety, no ostentatious display of
gigantic agonies and writhings under a dark destiny, no pictures of
plunging down into depths of mystery and of woe beyond the diving
powers of ordinary mortals. It is healthy, clear, joyous, for the most
part, and musical as nature itself. In entering into the region of
Tennyson's poetry you enter one of sun and calm. The land of romance,
of dream, of fairy; the land of beauty, glory, and repose, stretching
on through all the regions of the earth, wherever genius has alighted
in any age, wherever mind has put forth its forms of divinest grace.
It belongs to what may be termed the romantic school, yet it is often
purely classical. You see in such poems as the Lotus Eaters, OEnone,
Ulysses, etc., that Tennyson loves to sit by the immortal wells of
Homer; to wander amid the godlike habitants of the Greek Elysium. But
whether there, or at the court of "great Haroun Alraschid," or in the
spell-bound castles of German Legend, or in our own middle ages, he
alike infuses into all his subjects the spirit of the romantic. That
spirit which at once invests every thing which it touches with the
vitality of beauty, of tenderness, and of purity heavenly, and yet--
"Not too good
For human nature's daily food."
Alfred Tennyson loves to individualize; to select some person or scene
from the multitude or the mass, and to throw himself wholly into it.
From the heart of this personage or group of personages he speaks for
the time, the unerring oracle of human nature. We are seized,
engrossed, charmed, entranced, for the space of this impersonation;
for it is human nature in all the power and beauty of its greatness,
of its passions and its sufferings, of its eternal yearnings and its
unquenchable love, its daring, its crime and desolation, that unfolds
to you its history and its inner life. There is no man, except
Shakspeare, who has more thoroughly and eminently possessed this
faculty of interpretation, of comprehending and giving voice to the
infinite laws and movements of universal humanity; and there is no
other who has been endowed for the purpose with a gift of speech so
rich, genial, and specially demonstrative. We have no misgivings, as
we read Tennyson, whether any thing be poetry or not; we have no
feeling of a want in the phraseology. Thought, language, imagery, all
flow together from one source; that of a genius creative in all the
attributes of life, or in the life itself--in color, taste, motion,
grace, and sentiment. Whatever is produced, lives. It is no dead form;
it is no half-sentient form; it is perfect in spirit, in beauty, and
in abode.
The poetry of Tennyson, like that of Shakspeare, seems to possess a
music of its own. It is evidently evolved amid the intense play of
melodies which are as much a part of the individual mind itself, as
the harmonies of nature are a part of nature. Like Shakspeare,
Tennyson is especially fond of, or rather haunted by musical refrains,
and airs that are not invented but struck out; that can not be
conceived by any labor of thought, but are inspired; and that once
communicated to the atmosphere, will go chiming on forever.
"Motions flow
To one another, even as though
They were modulated so
To an unheard melody,
Which lives about them, and a sweep
Of richest pauses evermore
Drawn from each other, mellow--deep."
Of these refrains, Oriana, and the Lady of Shalott, present striking
examples.
"When Norland winds pipe down the sea,
Oriana,
I walk, I dare not think of thee,
Oriana.
Thou liest beneath the greenwood tree,
I dare not die and come to thee,
Oriana.
I hear the roaring of the sea,
Oriana."
Or you may take the very first little melody with which this volume
opens.