"The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean fowl,
The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
The moving whisper of huge trees that branched
And blossomed in the zenith";
of
"The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
The hollower-bellowing Ocean, and again
The scarlet shafts of sunrise."
These lines represent movement on the grand natural scale--taking place
in that measured, majestic fashion which, at any given moment, seems
identical with permanence. One is almost ashamed to quote Tennyson; one
can hardly lay one's hand on a passage that does not form part of the
common stock of reference and recitation. Passages of the more impulsive
and spontaneous kind will of course chiefly be found in his lyrics and
rhymed verses (though rhyme would at first seem but another check upon
his freedom); and passages of the kind to which I have been calling
attention, chiefly in his narrative poems, in the _Idyls_ generally, and
especially in the later ones, while the words strike one as having been
pondered and collated with an almost miserly care.
But a man has always the qualities of his defects, and if Tennyson is
what I have called a static poet, he at least represents repose and
stillness and the fixedness of things, with a splendour that no poet
has surpassed. We all of this generation have lived in such intimacy
with him, and made him so much part of our regular intellectual meat and
drink, that it requires a certain effort to hold him off at the proper
distance for scanning him. We need to cease mechanically murmuring his
lines, so that we may hear them speak for themselves.
Few persons who have grown up within the last forty years but have
passed through the regular Tennysonian phase; happy few who have paid it
a merely passive tribute, and not been moved to commit their emotions to
philosophic verse, in the metre of "In Memoriam"! The phase has lasted
longer with some persons than with others; but it will not be denied
that with the generation at large it has visibly declined. The young
persons of twenty now read Tennyson (though, as we imagine, with a
fervour less intense than that which prevailed twenty years ago); but
the young persons of thirty read Browning and Dante Rossetti, and Omar
Kheyam--and are also sometimes heard to complain that poetry is dead and
that there is nothing nowadays to read.
We have heard Tennyson called "dainty" so often, we have seen so many
allusions to the "Tennysonian trick," we have been so struck, in a
certain way, with M. Taine's remarkable portrait of the poet, in
contrast to that of Alfred de Musset, that every one who has anything of
a notion of keeping abreast of what is called the "culture of the time"
is rather shy of making an explicit, or even a serious profession of
admiration for his earlier idol. It has long been the fashion to praise
Byron, if one praises him at all, with an apologetic smile; and Tennyson
has been, I think, in a measure, tacitly classed with the author of
"Childe Harold" as a poet whom one thinks most of while one's taste is
immature.
This is natural enough, I suppose, and the taste of the day must travel
to its opportunity's end. But I do not believe that Byron has passed, by
any means, and I do not think that Tennyson has been proved to be a
secondary or a tertiary poet. If he is not in the front rank, it is hard
to see what it is that constitutes exquisite quality. There are poets of
a larger compass; he has not the passion of Shelley nor the transcendent
meditation of Wordsworth; but his inspiration, in its own current, is
surely as pure as theirs. He depicts the assured beauties of life, the
things that civilisation has gained and permeated, and he does it with
an ineffable delicacy of imagination. Only once, as it seems to me (at
the close of "Maud"), has he struck the note of irrepressible emotion,
and appeared to say the thing that must be said at the moment, at any
cost. For the rest, his verse is the verse of leisure, of luxury, of
contemplation, of a faculty that circumstances have helped to become
fastidious; but this leaves it a wide province--a province that it fills
with a sovereign splendour.
When a poet is such an artist as Tennyson, such an unfaltering,
consummate master, it is no shame to surrender one's self to his spell.
Reading him over here and there, as I have been doing, I have received
an extraordinary impression of talent--talent ripened and refined, and
passed, with a hundred incantations, through the crucible of taste. The
reader is in thoroughly good company, and if the language is to a
certain extent that of a coterie, the coterie can offer convincing
evidence of its right to be exclusive. Its own tone is exquisite; listen
to it, and you will desire nothing more.
Tennyson's various _Idyls_ have been in some degree discredited by
insincere imitations, and in some degree, perhaps, by an inevitable
lapse of sympathy on the part of some people from what appears their
falsetto pitch. That King Arthur, in the great ones of the series, is
rather a prig, and that he couldn't have been all the poet represents
him without being a good deal of a hypocrite; that the poet himself is
too monotonously unctuous, and that in relating the misdeeds of
Launcelot and Guinevere he seems, like the lady in the play in "Hamlet,"
to "protest too much" for wholesomeness--all this has been often said,
and said with abundant force. But there is a way of reading the
_Idyls_, one and all, and simply enjoying them. It has been, just now,
the way of the writer of these lines; he does not exactly know what may
be gained by taking the other way, but he feels as if there were a
pitiful loss in not taking this one. If one surrenders one's sense to
their perfect picturesqueness, it is the most charming poetry in the
world. The prolonged, delicate, exquisite sustentation of the pictorial
tone seems to me a marvel of ingenuity and fancy. It appeals to a highly
cultivated sense, but what enjoyment is so keen as that of the
cultivated sense when its finer nerve is really touched? The _Idyls_ all
belong to the poetry of association; but before they were written we had
yet to learn how finely association could be analysed, and how softly
its chords could be played upon. When Enoch Arden came back from his
desert island,
"He like a lover down through all his blood
Drew in the dewy, meadowy morning breath
Of England, blown across her ghostly wall."
Tennyson's solid verbal felicities, his unerring sense of the romantic,
his acute perception of everything in nature that may contribute to his
fund of exquisite imagery, his refinement, his literary tone, his aroma
of English lawns and English libraries, the whole happy chance of his
selection of the Arthurian legends--all this, and a dozen minor graces
which it would take almost his own "daintiness" to formulate, make him,
it seems to me, the most charming of the _entertaining_ poets. It is as
an entertaining poet I chiefly think of him; his morality, at moments,
is certainly importunate enough, but elevated as it is, it never seems
to me of so fine a distillation as his imagery. As a didactic creation I
do not greatly care for King Arthur; but as a fantastic one he is
infinitely remunerative. He is doubtless not, as an intellectual
conception, massive enough to be called a great figure; but he is,
picturesquely, so admirably self-consistent, that the reader's
imagination is quite willing to turn its back, if need be, on his
judgment, and give itself up to idle enjoyment.
As regards Tennyson's imagery, anything that one quotes in illustration
is, as I have said, certain to be extremely familiar; but even
familiarity can hardly dull the beauty of such a touch as that about
Merlin's musings:
"So dark a forethought rolled about his brain,
As on a dull day in an Ocean cave
The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall
In silence."
Or of that which puts in vivid form the estrangement of Enid and
Geraint:
"The two remained
Apart by all the chamber's width, and mute
As creatures voiceless through the fault of birth,
Or two wild men, supporters of a shield,
Painted, who stare at open space, nor glance
The one at other, parted by the shield."