A new poem by Mr. Tennyson is certain to be largely criticised, and if
the new poem is a drama, the performance must be a great event for
criticism as well as for poetry. Great surprise, great hopes, and great
fears had been called into being by the announcement that the author of
so many finely musical lyrics and finished, chiselled specimens of
narrative verse, had tempted fortune in the perilous field of the drama.
Few poets seemed less dramatic than Tennyson, even in his most dramatic
attempts--in "Maud," in "Enoch Arden," or in certain of the _Idyls of
the King_. He had never used the dramatic form, even by snatches; and
though no critic was qualified to affirm that he had no slumbering
ambition in that direction, it seemed likely that a poet who had
apparently passed the meridian of his power had nothing absolutely new
to show us. On the other hand, if he had for years been keeping a gift
in reserve, and suffering it to ripen and mellow in some deep corner of
his genius, while shallower tendencies waxed and waned above it, it was
not unjust to expect that the consummate fruit would prove magnificent.
On the whole, we think that doubt was uppermost in the minds of those
persons who to a lively appreciation of the author of "Maud" added a
vivid conception of the exigencies of the drama. But at last _Queen
Mary_ appeared, and conjecture was able to merge itself in knowledge.
There was a momentary interval, during which we all read, among the
cable telegrams in the newspapers, that the London _Times_ affirmed the
new drama to contain more "true fire" than anything since Shakespeare
had laid down the pen. This gave an edge to our impatience; for "fire,"
true or false, was not what the Laureate's admirers had hitherto claimed
for him. In a day or two, however, most people had the work in their
hands.
Every one, it seems to us, has been justified--those who hoped (that is,
expected), those who feared, and those who were mainly surprised. _Queen
Mary_ is both better and less good than was to have been supposed, and
both in its merits and its defects it is extremely singular. It is the
least Tennysonian of all the author's productions; and we may say that
he has not so much refuted as evaded the charge that he is not a
dramatic poet. To produce his drama he has had to cease to be himself.
Even if _Queen Mary_, as a drama, had many more than its actual faults,
this fact alone--this extraordinary defeasance by the poet of his
familiar identity--would make it a remarkable work.
We know of few similar phenomena in the history of literature--few such
examples of rupture with a consecrated past. Poets in their prime have
groped and experimented, tried this and that, and finally made a great
success in a very different vein from that in which they had found their
early successes. But the writers in prose or in verse are few who, after
a lifetime spent in elaborating and perfecting a certain definite and
extremely characteristic manner, have at Mr. Tennyson's age suddenly
dismissed it from use and stood forth clad from head to foot in a
disguise without a flaw. We are sure that the other great English
poet--the author of "The Ring and the Book,"--would be quite incapable
of any such feat. The more's the pity, as many of his readers will say!
_Queen Mary_ is upward of three hundred pages long; and yet in all these
three hundred pages there is hardly a trace of the Tennyson we know. Of
course the reader is on the watch for reminders of the writer he has
greatly loved; and of course, vivid signs being absent, he finds a
certain eloquence in the slightest intimations. When he reads that
----"that same tide
Which, coming with our coming, seemed to smile
And sparkle like our fortune as thou saidest,
Ran sunless down and moaned against the piers,"
he seems for a moment to detect the peculiar note and rhythm of "Enoch
Arden" or "The Princess." Just preceding these, indeed, is a line which
seems Tennysonian because it is in a poem by Tennyson:
"Last night I climbed into the gate-house, Brett,
And scared the gray old porter and his wife."
In such touches as these the Tennysonian note is faintly struck; but if
the poem were unsigned, they would not do much toward pointing out the
author. On the other hand, the fine passages in _Queen Mary_ are
conspicuously deficient in those peculiar cadences--that exquisite
perfume of diction--which every young poet of the day has had his hour
of imitating. We may give as an example Pole's striking denial of the
charge that the Church of Rome has ever known trepidation:
"What, my Lord!
The Church on Petra's rock? Never! I have seen
A pine in Italy that cast its shadow
Athwart a cataract; firm stood the pine--
The cataract shook the shadow. To my mind
The cataract typed the headlong plunge and fall
Of heresy to the pit: the pine was Rome.
You see, my Lords,
It was the shadow of the Church that trembled."
This reads like Tennyson doing his best not to be Tennyson, and very
fairly succeeding. Well as he succeeds, however, and admirably skilful
and clever as is his attempt throughout to play tricks with his old
habits of language, and prove that he was not the slave but the master
of the classic Tennysonian rhythm, I think that few readers can fail to
ask themselves whether the new gift is of equal value with the old. The
question will perhaps set them to fingering over the nearest volume of
the poet at hand, to refresh their memory of his ancient magic. It has
rendered the present writer this service, and he feels as if it were a
considerable one. Every great poet has something that he does supremely
well, and when you come upon Tennyson at his best you feel that you are
dealing with poetry at its highest. One of the best passages in _Queen
Mary_--the only one, it seems to me, very sensibly warmed by the "fire"
commemorated by the London _Times_--is the passionate monologue of Mary
when she feels what she supposes to be the intimations of maternity:
"He hath awaked, he hath awaked!
He stirs within the darkness!
Oh Philip, husband! how thy love to mine
Will cling more close, and those bleak manners thaw,
That make me shamed and tongue-tied in my love.
The second Prince of Peace--
The great unborn defender of the Faith,
Who will avenge me of mine enemies--
He comes, and my star rises.
The stormy Wyatts and Northumberlands
And proud ambitions of Elizabeth,
And all her fiercest partisans, are pale
Before my star!
His sceptre shall go forth from Ind to Ind!
His sword shall hew the heretic peoples down!
His faith shall clothe the world that will be his,
Like universal air and sunshine! Open,
Ye everlasting gates! The King is here!--
My star, my son!"
That is very fine, and its broken verses and uneven movement have great
felicity and suggestiveness. But their magic is as nothing, surely, to
the magic of such a passage as this:
"Yet hold me not for ever in thine East;
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, where the stream
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me and restore me to the ground;
Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave;
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I, earth in earth, forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels."
In these beautiful lines from "Tithonus" there is a purity of tone, an
inspiration, a something sublime and exquisite, which is easily within
the compass of Mr. Tennyson's usual manner at its highest, but which is
not easily achieved by any really dramatic verse. It is poised and
stationary, like a bird whose wings have borne him high, but the beauty
of whose movement is less in great ethereal sweeps and circles than in
the way he hangs motionless in the blue air, with only a vague tremor of
his pinions. Even if the idea with Tennyson were more largely dramatic
than it usually is, the immobility, as we must call it, of his phrase
would always defeat the dramatic intention. When he wishes to represent
movement, the phrase always seems to me to pause and slowly pivot upon
itself, or at most to move backward. I do not know whether the reader
recognizes the peculiarity to which I allude; one has only to open
Tennyson almost at random to find an example of it:
"For once when Arthur, walking all alone,
Vext at a rumour rife about the Queen,
Had met her, Vivien being greeted fair,
Would fain have wrought upon his cloudy mood
With reverent eyes mock-loyal, shaken voice,
And fluttered adoration."
That perhaps is a subtle illustration; the allusion to Teolin's dog in
"Aylmer's Field" is a franker one:
----"his old Newfoundlands, when they ran
To lose him at the stables; for he rose,
Two-footed, at the limit of his chain,
Roaring to make a third."
What these pictures present is not the action itself, but the poet's
complex perception of it; it seems hardly more vivid and genuine than
the sustained posturings of brilliant _tableaux vivants_. With the poets
who are natural chroniclers of movement, the words fall into their
places as with some throw of the dice, which fortune should always
favour. With Scott and Byron they leap into the verse _a pieds joints_,
and shake it with their coming; with Tennyson they arrive slowly and
settle cautiously into their attitudes, after having well scanned the
locality. In consequence they are generally exquisite, and make
exquisite combinations; but the result is intellectual poetry and not
passionate--poetry which, if the term is not too pedantic, one may
qualify as static poetry. Any scene of violence represented by Tennyson
is always singularly limited and compressed; it is reduced to a few
elements--refined to a single statuesque episode. There are, for
example, several descriptions of tournaments and combats in the _Idyls
of the King_. They are all most beautiful, but they are all curiously
delicate. One gets no sense of the din and shock of battle; one seems to
be looking at a bas relief of two contesting knights in chiselled
silver, on a priceless piece of plate. They belong to the same family as
that charming description, in Hawthorne's _Marble Faun_, of the sylvan
dance of Donatello and Miriam in the Borghese gardens. Hawthorne talks
of the freedom and frankness of their mirth and revelry; what we seem to
see is a solemn frieze in stone along the base of a monument. These are
the natural fruits of geniuses who are of the brooding rather than the
impulsive order. I do not mean to say that here and there Tennyson does
not give us a couplet in which motion seems reflected without being made
to tarry. I open "Enoch Arden" at hazard, and I read of Enoch's ship
that
----"at first indeed
Thro' many a fair sea-circle, day by day,
Scarce rocking, her full-busted figure-head
Stared o'er the ripple feathering from her bows."