If Tennyson's reputation has diminished, it is not that it has fallen
before hostile criticism: it has merely faded through time. Perhaps there
was never an English poet who loomed so large to his own age as
Tennyson--who represented his contemporaries with the same passion and
power. Pope was sufficiently representative of his age, but his age meant,
by comparison, a limited and aristocratic circle. Byron represented and
shocked his age by turns. Tennyson, on the other hand, was as close to the
educated middle-class men and women of his time as the family clergyman.
That is why, inevitably, he means less to us than he did to them. That he
was ahead of his age on many points on which this could not be said of the
family clergyman one need not dispute. He was a kind of "new theologian."
He stood, like Dean Farrar, for the larger hope and various other
heresies. Every representative man is ahead of his age--a little, but not
enough to be beyond the reach of the sympathies of ordinary people. It may
be objected that Tennyson is primarily an artist, not a thinker, and that
he should be judged not by his message but by his song. But his message
and his song sprang from the same vision--a vision of the world seen, not
_sub specie æternitatis_, but _sub specie_ the reign of Queen Victoria.
Before we appreciate Tennyson's real place in literature, we must frankly
recognize the fact that his muse wore a crinoline. The great mass of his
work bears its date stamped upon it as obviously almost as a copy of _The
Times_. How topical, both in mood and phrasing, are such lines as those in
_Locksley Hall:_
Then her cheek was pale, and thinner than should be for one so young.
And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.
And I said "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me,
Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee."
One would not, of course, quote these lines as typical of Tennyson's
genius. I think, however, they may be fairly quoted as lines suggesting
the mid-Victorian atmosphere that clings round all but his greatest work.
They bring before our minds the genteel magazine illustrations of other
days. They conjure up a world of charming, vapid faces, where there is
little life apart from sentiment and rhetoric. Contrast such a poem as
_Locksley Hall_ with _The Flight of the Duchess_. Each contains at once a
dramatization of human relations, and the statement of a creed. The human
beings in Browning's poem, however, are not mere shadows out of old
magazines; they are as real as the men and women in the portraits of the
masters, as real as ourselves. Similarly, in expressing his thought,
Browning gives it imaginative dignity as philosophy, while Tennyson writes
what is after all merely an exalted leading article. There is more in
common between Tennyson and Lytton than is generally realized. Both were
fond of windy words. They were slaves of language to almost as great an
extent as Swinburne. One feels that too often phrases like "moor and fell"
and "bower and hall" were mere sounding substitutes for a creative
imagination. I have heard it argued that the lines in _Maud_:
All night have the roses heard
The flute, violin, bassoon;
introduce a curiously inappropriate instrument into a ball-room orchestra
merely for the sake of euphony. The mistake about the bassoon is a small
one, and is, I suppose, borrowed from Coleridge, but it is characteristic.
Tennyson was by no means the complete artist that for years he was
generally accepted as being. He was an artist of lines rather than of
poems. He seldom wrote a poem which seemed to spring full-armed from the
imagination as the great poems of the world do. He built them up
haphazard, as Thackeray wrote his novels. They are full of sententious
padding and prettiness, and the wordiness is not merely a philosopher's
vacuous babbling in his sleep, as so much of Wordsworth is; it is the
word-spinning of a man who loves words more than people, or philosophy, or
things. Let us admit at once that when Tennyson is word perfect he takes
his place among the immortals. One may be convinced that the bulk of his
work is already as dead as the bulk of Longfellow's work. But in his great
poems he awoke to the vision of romance in its perfect form, and expressed
it perfectly. He did this in _Ulysses_, which comes nearer a noble
perfection, perhaps, than anything else he ever wrote. One can imagine the
enthusiasm of some literary discoverer many centuries hence, when Tennyson
is as little known as Donne was fifty years ago, coming upon lines
hackneyed for us by much quotation:
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
There, even if you have not the stalwart imagination which makes
Browning's people alive, you have a most beautiful fancy illustrating an
old story. One of the most beautiful lines Tennyson ever wrote:
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing,
has the same suggestion of having been forged from the gold of the world's
romance.
Tennyson's art at its best, however, and in these two instances is art
founded upon art, not art founded upon life. We used to be asked to admire
the vivid observation shown in such lines as:
More black than ashbuds in the front of March;
and it is undoubtedly interesting to learn that Tennyson had a quick eye
for the facts of nature. But such lines, however accurate, do not make a
man a poet. It is in his fine ornamental moods that Tennyson means most to
our imaginations nowadays--in the moods of such lines as:
Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost.
The truth is, Tennyson, with all his rhetoric and with all his prosaic
Victorian opinions, was an æsthete in the immortal part of him no less
than were Rossetti and Swinburne. He seemed immense to his contemporaries,
because he put their doubts and fears into music, and was master of the
fervid rhetoric of the new gospel of Imperialism. They did not realize
that great poetry cannot be founded on a basis of perishable doubts and
perishable gospels. It was enough for them to feel that _In Memoriam_ gave
them soothing anchorage and shelter from the destructive hurricanes of
science. It was enough for them to thrill to the public-speech poetry of
_Of old sat Freedom on the Heights_, the patriotic triumph of _The Relief
of Lucknow_, the glorious contempt for foreigners exhibited in his
references to "the red fool-fury of the Seine." Is it any wonder that
during a great part of his life Tennyson was widely regarded as not only a
poet, but a teacher and a statesman? His sneering caricature of Bright as
the "broad-brimmed hawker of holy things" should have made it clear that
in politics he was but a party man, and that his political intelligence
was commonplace.
He was too deficient in the highest kind of imagination and intellect to
achieve the greatest things. He seldom or never stood aloof from his own
time, as Wordsworth did through his philosophic imagination, as Keats did
through his æsthetic imagination, as Browning did through his dramatic
imagination. He wore a poetical cloak, and avoided the vulgar crowd
physically; he had none of Browning's taste for tea-parties. But Browning
had not the tea-party imagination; Tennyson, in a great degree, had. He
preached excellent virtues to his time; but they were respectable rather
than spiritual virtues. Thus, _The Idylls of the King_ have become to us
mere ancient fashion-plates of the virtues, while the moral power of _The
Ring and the Book_ is as commanding to-day as in the year in which the
poem was first published.
It is all the more surprising that no good selection from Tennyson has yet
appeared. His "complete works" contain so much that is ephemeral and
uninspired as to be a mere book of reference on our shelves. When will
some critic do for him what Matthew Arnold did for Wordsworth, and
separate the gold from the dross--do it as well as Matthew Arnold did it
for Wordsworth? Such a volume would be far thinner than the Wordsworth
selection. But it would entitle Tennyson to a much higher place among the
poets than in these years of the reaction he is generally given.