Fifty years after Tennyson's birth he was saluted a great poet by that
unanimous acclamation which includes mere clamour. Fifty further years,
and his centenary was marked by a new detraction. It is sometimes
difficult to distinguish the obscure but not unmajestic law of change
from the sorry custom of reaction. Change hastes not and rests not,
reaction beats to and fro, flickering about the moving mind of the world.
Reaction--the paltry precipitancy of the multitude--rather than the
novelty of change, has brought about a ferment and corruption of opinion
on Tennyson's poetry. It may be said that opinion is the same now as it
was in the middle of the nineteenth century--the same, but turned. All
that was not worth having of admiration then has soured into detraction
now. It is of no more significance, acrid, than it was, sweet. What the
herding of opinion gave yesterday it is able to take away to-day, that
and no more.
But besides the common favour-disfavour of the day, there is the tendency
of educated opinion, once disposed to accept the whole of Tennyson's
poetry as though he could not be "parted from himself," and now disposed
to reject the whole, on the same plea. But if ever there was a poet who
needed to be thus "parted"--the word is his own--it is he who wrote both
narrowly for his time and liberally for all time, and who--this is the
more important character of his poetry--had both a style and a manner: a
masterly style, a magical style, a too dainty manner, nearly a trick; a
noble landscape and in it figures something ready-made. He is a subject
for our alternatives of feeling, nay, our conflicts, as is hardly another
poet. We may deeply admire and wonder, and, in another line or
hemistich, grow indifferent or slightly averse. He sheds the luminous
suns of dreams upon men & women who would do well with footlights; waters
their way with rushing streams of Paradise and cataracts from visionary
hills; laps them in divine darkness; leads them into those touching
landscapes, "the lovely that are not beloved;" long grey fields, cool
sombre summers, and meadows thronged with unnoticeable flowers; speeds
his carpet knight--or is that hardly a just name for one whose sword
"smites" so well?--upon a carpet of authentic wild flowers; pushes his
rovers, in costume, from off blossoming shores, on the keels of old
romance. The style and the manner, I have said, run side by side. If we
may take one poet's too violent phrase, and consider poets to be "damned
to poetry," why, then, Tennyson is condemned by a couple of sentences,
"to run concurrently." We have the style and the manner locked together
at times in a single stanza, locked and yet not mingled. There should be
no danger for the more judicious reader lest impatience at the peculiar
Tennyson trick should involve the great Tennyson style in a sweep of
protest. Yet the danger has in fact proved real within the present and
recent years, and seems about to threaten still more among the less
judicious. But it will not long prevail. The vigorous little nation of
lovers of poetry, alive one by one within the vague multitude of the
nation of England, cannot remain finally insensible to what is at once
majestic and magical in Tennyson. For those are not qualities they
neglect in their other masters. How, valuing singleness of heart in the
sixteenth century, splendour in the seventeenth, composure in the
eighteenth; how, with a spiritual ear for the note--commonly called
Celtic, albeit it is the most English thing in the world--the wild wood
note of the remoter song; how, with the educated sense of style, the
liberal sense of ease; how, in a word, fostering Letters and loving
Nature, shall that choice nation within England long disregard these
virtues in the nineteenth-century master? How disregard him, for more
than the few years of reaction, for the insignificant reasons of his
bygone taste, his insipid courtliness, his prettiness, or what not? It
is no dishonour to Tennyson, for it is a dishonour to our education, to
disparage a poet who wrote but the two--had he written no more of their
kind--lines of "The Passing of Arthur," of which, before I quote them, I
will permit myself the personal remembrance of a great contemporary
author's opinion. Mr. Meredith, speaking to me of the high-water mark of
English style in poetry and prose, cited those lines as topmost in
poetry:-
On one side lay the ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.
Here is no taint of manner, no pretty posture or habit, but the
simplicity of poetry and the simplicity of Nature, something on the
yonder side of imagery. It is to be noted that this noble passage is
from Tennyson's generally weakest kind of work--blank verse; and should
thus be a sign that the laxity of so many parts of the "Idylls" and other
blank verse poems was a quite unnecessary fault. Lax this form of poetry
undoubtedly is with Tennyson. His blank verse is often too easy; it
cannot be said to fly, for the paradoxical reason that it has no weight;
it slips by, without halting or tripping indeed, but also without the
friction of the movement of vitality. This quality, which is so near to
a fault, this quality of ease, has come to be disregarded in our day.
That Horace Walpole overpraised this virtue is not good reason that we
should hold it for a vice. Yet we do more than undervalue it; and
several of our authors, in prose and poetry, seem to find much merit in
the manifest difficulty; they will not have a key to turn, though closely
and tightly, in oiled wards; let the reluctant iron catch and grind, or
they would even prefer to pick you the lock.
But though we may think it time that the quality once over-prized should
be restored to a more proportionate honour, our great poet Tennyson shows
us that of all merits ease is, unexpectedly enough, the most dangerous.
It is not only, with him, that the wards are oiled, it is also that the
key turns loosely. This is true of much of the beautiful "Idylls," but
not of their best passages, nor of such magnificent heroic verse as that
of the close of "A Vision of Sin," or of "Lucretius." As to the question
of ease, we cannot have a better maxim than Coventry Patmore's saying
that poetry "should confess, but not suffer from, its difficulties." And
we could hardly find a more curious example of the present love of verse
that not only confesses but brags of difficulties, and not only suffers
from them but cries out under the suffering, and shows us the grimace of
the pain of it, than I have lighted upon in the critical article of a
recent quarterly. Reviewing the book of a "poet" who manifestly has an
insuperable difficulty in hacking his work into ten-syllable blocks, and
keeping at the same time any show of respect for the national grammar,
the critic gravely invites his reader to "note" the phrase "neath cliffs"
(apparently for "beneath the cliffs") as "characteristic." Shall the
reader indeed "note" such a matter? Truly he has other things to do.
This is by the way. Tennyson is always an artist, and the finish of his
work is one of the principal notes of his versification. How this finish
comports with the excessive ease of his prosody remains his own peculiar
secret. Ease, in him, does not mean that he has any unhandsome slovenly
ways. On the contrary, he resembles rather the warrior with the pouncet
box. It is the man of "neath cliffs" who will not be at the trouble of
making a place for so much as a definite article. Tennyson certainly
_worked_, and the exceeding ease of his blank verse comes perhaps of this
little paradox--that he makes somewhat too much show of the hiding of his
art.
In the first place the poet with the great welcome style and the little
unwelcome manner, Tennyson is, in the second place, the modern poet who
withstood France. (That is, of course, modern France--France since the
Renaissance. From medieval Provence there is not an English poet who
does not own inheritance.) It was some time about the date of the
Restoration that modern France began to be modish in England. A ruffle
at the Court of Charles, a couplet in the ear of Pope, a _tour de
phrase_ from Mme. de Sevigne much to the taste of Walpole, later the
good example of French painting--rich interest paid for the loan of our
Constable's initiative--later still a scattering of French taste, French
critical business, over all the shallow places of our literature--these
have all been phases of a national vanity of ours, an eager and anxious
fluttering or jostling to be foremost and French. Matthew Arnold's essay
on criticism fostered this anxiety, and yet I find in this work of his a
lack of easy French knowledge, such as his misunderstanding of the word
_brutalite_, which means no more, or little more, than roughness. Matthew
Arnold, by the way, knew so little of the French character as to be
altogether ignorant of French provincialism, French practical sense, and
French "convenience." "Convenience" is his dearest word of contempt,
"practical sense" his next dearest, and he throws them a score of times
in the teeth of the English. Strange is the irony of the truth. For he
bestows those withering words on the nation that has the fifty religions,
and attributes "ideas"--as the antithesis of "convenience" and "practical
sense"--to the nation that has the fifty sauces. And not for a moment
does he suspect himself of this blunder, so manifest as to be
disconcerting to his reader. One seems to hear an incurably English
accent in all this, which indeed is reported, by his acquaintance, of
Matthew Arnold's actual speaking of French. It is certain that he has
not the interest of familiarity with the language, but only the interest
of strangeness. Now, while we meet the effect of the French coat in our
seventeenth century, of the French light verse in our earlier eighteenth
century, and of French philosophy in our later, of the French revolution
in our Wordsworth, of the French painting in our nineteenth-century
studios, of French fiction--and the dregs are still running--in our
libraries, of French poetry in our Swinburne, of French criticism in our
Arnold, Tennyson shows the effect of nothing French whatever. Not the
Elizabethans, not Shakespeare, not Jeremy Taylor, not Milton, not Shelley
were (in their art, not in their matter) more insular in their time.
France, by the way, has more than appreciated the homage of Tennyson's
contemporaries; Victor Hugo avers, in _Les Miserables_, that our people
imitate his people in all things, and in particular he rouses in us a
delighted laughter of surprise by asserting that the London street-boy
imitates the Parisian street-boy. There is, in fact, something of a
street-boy in some of our late more literary mimicries.
We are apt to judge a poet too exclusively by his imagery. Tennyson is
hardly a great master of imagery. He has more imagination than imagery.
He sees the thing, with so luminous a mind's eye, that it is sufficient
to him; he needs not to see it more beautifully by a similitude. "A
clear-walled city" is enough; "meadows" are enough--indeed Tennyson
reigns for ever over all meadows; "the happy birds that change their
sky"; "Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night"; "Twilight and evening
bell"; "the stillness of the central sea"; "that friend of mine who lives
in God"; "the solitary morning"; "Four grey walls and four grey towers";
"Watched by weeping queens"; these are enough, illustrious, and needing
not illustration.
If we do not see Tennyson to be the lonely, the first, the _one_ that he
is, this is because of the throng of his following, though a number that
are of that throng hardly know, or else would deny, their flocking. But
he added to our literature not only in the way of cumulation, but by the
advent of his single genius. He is one of the few fountain-head poets of
the world. The new landscape which was his--the lovely unbeloved--is, it
need hardly be said, the matter of his poetry and not its inspiration. It
may have seemed to some readers that it is the novelty, in poetry, of
this homely unscenic scenery--this Lincolnshire quality--that accounts
for Tennyson's freshness of vision. But it is not so. Tennyson is fresh
also in scenic scenery; he is fresh with the things that others have
outworn; mountains, desert islands, castles, elves, what you will that is
conventional. Where are there more divinely poetic lines than those,
which will never be wearied with quotation, beginning, "A splendour
falls"? What castle walls have stood in such a light of old romance,
where in all poetry is there a sound wilder than that of those faint
"horns of elfland"? Here is the remoteness, the beyond, the light
delirium, not of disease but of more rapturous and delicate health, the
closer secret of poetry. This most English of modern poets has been
taunted with his mere gardens. He loved, indeed, the "lazy lilies," of
the exquisite garden of "The Gardener's Daughter," but he betook his
ecstatic English spirit also far afield and overseas; to the winter
places of his familiar nightingale:-
When first the liquid note beloved of men
Comes flying over many a windy wave;
to the lotus-eaters' shore; to the outland landscapes of "The Palace of
Art"--the "clear-walled city by the sea," the "pillared town," the "full-
fed river"; to the "pencilled valleys" of Monte Rosa; to the "vale in
Ida"; to that tremendous upland in the "Vision of Sin":-
At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, Is there any hope?
To which an answer pealed from that high land,
But in a tongue no man could understand.
The Cleopatra of "The Dream of Fair Women" is but a ready-made Cleopatra,
but when in the shades of her forest she remembers the sun of the world,
she leaves the page of Tennyson's poorest manner and becomes one with
Shakespeare's queen:-
We drank the Libyan sun to sleep.
Nay, there is never a passage of manner but a great passage of style
rebukes our dislike and recalls our heart again. The dramas, less than
the lyrics, and even less than the "Idylls," are matter for the true
Tennysonian. Their action is, at its liveliest rather vivacious than
vital, and the sentiment, whether in "Becket" or in "Harold," is not only
modern, it is fixed within Tennyson's own peculiar score or so of years.
But that he might have answered, in drama, to a stronger stimulus, a
sharper spur, than his time administered, may be guessed from a few
passages of "Queen Mary," and from the dramatic terror of the arrow in
"Harold." The line has appeared in prophetic fragments in earlier
scenes, and at the moment of doom it is the outcry of unquestionable
tragedy:-
Sanguelac--Sanguelac--the arrow--the arrow!--Away!
Tennyson is also an eminently all-intelligible poet. Those whom he
puzzles or confounds must be a flock with an incalculable liability to go
wide of any road--"down all manner of streets," as the desperate drover
cries in the anecdote. But what are streets, however various, to the
ways of error that a great flock will take in open country--minutely,
individually wrong, making mistakes upon hardly perceptible occasions, or
none--"minute fortuitous variations in any possible direction," as used
to be said in exposition of the Darwinian theory? A vast outlying
public, like that of Tennyson, may make you as many blunders as it has
heads; but the accurate clear poet proved his meaning to all accurate
perceptions. Where he hesitates, his is the sincere pause of process and
uncertainty. It has been said that Tennyson, midway between the student
of material science and the mystic, wrote and thought according to an age
that wavered, with him, between the two minds, and that men have now
taken one way or the other. Is this indeed true, and are men so divided
and so sure? Or have they not rather already turned, in numbers, back to
the parting, or meeting, of eternal roads? The religious question that
arises upon experience of death has never been asked with more sincerity
and attention than by him. If "In Memoriam" represents the mind of
yesterday it represents no less the mind of to-morrow. It is true that
pessimism and insurrection in their ignobler forms--nay, in the ignoblest
form of a fashion--have, or had but yesterday, the control of the popular
pen. Trivial pessimism or trivial optimism, it matters little which
prevails. For those who follow the one habit to-day would have followed
the other in a past generation. Fleeting as they are, it cannot be
within their competence to neglect or reject the philosophy of "In
Memoriam." To the dainty stanzas of that poem, it is true, no great
struggle of reasoning was to be committed, nor would any such dispute be
judiciously entrusted to the rhymes of a song of sorrow. Tennyson here
proposes, rather than closes with, the ultimate question of our destiny.
The conflict, for which he proves himself strong enough, is in that
magnificent poem of a thinker, "Lucretius." But so far as "In Memoriam"
attempts, weighs, falters, and confides, it is true to the experience of
human anguish and intellect.
I say intellect advisedly. Not for him such blunders of thought as
Coleridge's in "The Ancient Mariner" or Wordsworth's in "Hartleap Well."
Coleridge names the sun, moon, and stars as when, in a dream, the
sleeping imagination is threatened with some significant illness. We see
them in his great poem as apparitions. Coleridge's senses are infinitely
and transcendently spiritual. But a candid reader must be permitted to
think the mere story silly. The wedding-guest might rise the morrow morn
a sadder but he assuredly did not rise a wiser man.
As for Wordsworth, the most beautiful stanzas of "Hartleap Well" are
fatally rebuked by the truths of Nature. He shows us the ruins of an
aspen wood, a blighted hollow, a dreary place, forlorn because an
innocent stag, hunted, had there broken his heart in a leap from the
rocks above; grass would not grow there.
This beast not unobserved by Nature fell,
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.
And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted by the poet to be
these woodland ruins--cruelly, because the daily sight of the world
blossoming over the agonies of beast and bird is made less tolerable to
us by such a fiction.
The Being that is in the clouds and air
. . .
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creature whom He loves.
The poet offers us as a proof of that "reverential care," the visible
alteration of Nature at the scene of suffering--an alteration we have to
dispense with every day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to ask
whether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us--on such
grounds!--to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no more
than a fictitious sign and a false proof?
Nowhere in the whole of Tennyson's thought is there such an attack upon
our reason and our heart. He is more serious than the solemn Wordsworth.
_In Memoriam_, with all else that Tennyson wrote, tutors, with here and
there a subtle word, this nature-loving nation to perceive land, light,
sky, and ocean, as he perceived. To this we return, upon this we dwell.
He has been to us, firstly, the poet of two geniuses--a small and an
immense; secondly, the modern poet who answered in the negative that most
significant modern question, French or not French? But he was, before
the outset of all our study of him, of all our love of him, the poet of
landscape, and this he is more dearly than pen can describe him. This
eternal character of his is keen in the verse that is winged to meet a
homeward ship with her "dewy decks," and in the sudden island landscape,
The clover sod,
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God.