THE GENIUS OF TENNYSON. T HOSE who, in 1842, when Tennyson's

first important poems were published, were just old enough to love poetry, and yet young enough to have no prepossessions or prejudices against poetry of a new type, probably owe more to the great poet who is just dead, than either his own con- temporaries, whose taste in poetry was formed before his poems were published, or those younger generations which have grown up to find Tennyson's fame well established and taken for granted by the whole world around them. An original poet is usually more or less unwelcome to those who have formed their own taste on older models ; and yet there is something in the young which rather resents the conventional praise of the society in which they live, and delights to discover a literary hero for themselves. The death of the Poet- Laureate has brought a severe shock to those whose earliest intellectual youth was saturated with admiration for his rich, grave, measured, and elaborate genius, who in their College days declaimed to themselves the stately rhetoric of " Locksley Hall," brooded over the glowing pictures of the "Dream of Fair Women" and " The Palace of Art," wandered at will into the Palace of the Sleeping Beauty, followed all the windings of the subtle controversy between "The Two Voices," accompanied Sir Bedivere to the lake into which he was so reluctant to plunge Excalibur, and gazed at their own College friendships through the same "vinous mist" which coloured so charmingly the "lyrical monologue " of Will Waterproof at the Cock ; ' and all this, long before they had any opinion on the comparative merits of the many great English poets. Those who were growing up, but not yet grown up, in 1842, can hardly know how much of their ideal of life they owe to Tennyson, and how much to the innate bias of their own character. They only know that they owe him very much of the imaginative scenery of their own minds, much of their insight into the doubts and faith of their contemporaries, much of their political

preference for " ordered freedom," and much, too, of their fas- tidious discrimination between the various notes of tender and pathetic song. But they will find some difficulty in deter- mining what it is that Tennyson has most effectually taught them to enjoy and dread, where he has enlarged to most pur- pose the range of their love and reverence, and stimulated most powerfully their recoil from ugliness and evil.

We should say that perhaps the most distinctive, though not the most striking and impressive characteristic of Tenny- son's genius, was the definitely artistic character of his poetry. There is not a single one of his greater poems which does not bear the signs of careful thought and meditation, not to say study. There is both care and ease in every line,—the care of delicate touches, the ease which hides the care. Tennyson is not a poet whose poetry bubbles up and flows on with the superfluous buoyancy and redundancy of a fountain or a rapid. It is inlaid with conscious emotion, saturated with purpose and reflection. Its grace and ease,—and it is almost always graceful and easy,—are the grace and ease of a flexible and vigilant attention. There is what theologians call "recollection" in every line. He is as much artist as poet.

Nothing that he says seems to be unconscious. Even his passion is deliberate and more patient than stormy :-

" Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die,

I waited underneath the dawning hills, Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark, And dewy-dark aloft the mountain pine ; Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris, Leading a jet-black goat, white horned, white-hooved, Came up from reedy Simois, all alone."

What a richly painted picture is there, and that is Tennyson's usual style. Every verse of " The Palace of Art," every verse of " The Dream of Fair Women," is a separate work of art, a separate compartment of a great whole. Consider only the

rich workmanship, the masterly concentration of care on such a pair of stanzas as the following in the picture of Cleopatra :

" Her warbling voice, a lyre of widest range,

Struck by all passion did fall down and glance From tone to tone, and glided through all change Of liveliest utterance.

When she made pause, I knew not for delight; Because with sudden motion from the ground She raised her piercing orbs, and filled with light The interval of sound."

That is no ripple of artless eloquence. It is the very opulence of richly wrought imaginative speech.

And Tennyson's art is as signal in the careful ordering and evolution of his thoughts as in the painting of his pictures. Examine the structure of " The Two Voices," or of the argu-

ment with Scepticism, in "In Memoriam," and you will find how carefully the evolution of the whole is planned, how the simple and more obvious difficulties are dealt with first, the larger and wider further on, and how the whole presents the effect of a fully studied and gradually developed plan Tennyson was evidently one of those

"Who rowing hard against the stream, Saw distant gates of Eden gleam, And did not dream it was a dream,"

as he himself describes them. And yet be was willing to listen with rapt attention to all who did dream it was a dream,

that he might fully read all that was in their heart, and bring it to the judgment of his own larger and wider and richer experience.

Great as Tennyson was as an artist, he not unfrequently erred on the side of redundancy in the use of light and colour. His richly jewelled speech,—as in " Enoch Arden," —sometimes distracted attention from the substance of his narrative. He occasionally filled his canvas too fall of glowing and enamelled fancy. His poems, especially in the middle period of his genius, are almost too much con- cerned with the pageantry and sentiment of life, so that the outline is lost in the richness of the detail. Sometimes, too, he harps too much on the minor key,—as in that reiterated refrain, " Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die," which over- loads the beauty of " CEnone " with its plaintive wail, or on the over-wrought pathos of " The May Queen," or "Mariana in the Moated Grange." This is the chief defect of his art. But it is a fault wholly absent from those studies in which he assumed voluntarily the self-restraint, and even something of the severity of the classical models. In poems like " Tithonus " or "Ulysses" his art rises to its highest perfection :—

" I ask'd thee, 'Give me immortality.'

Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, Like wealthy men who care not how they give. But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me, And though they could not end me, left me maim'd To dwell in presence of immortal youth.

Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love, Thy beauty make amends, tho' even now Close over us, the silver star, thy guide, Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears To hear me ? Let me go; take back thy gift."

There we see the artist at his highest point,—the intensity of the feeling not allowed to overflow into any excess or redundancy of expression, but restrained with something of the severe simplicity of the Attic genius, while yet the passion of the rhythm, and a note or two of modern despair, betray the depth of self-conscious anguish that beats beneath the surface of the antique legend. In many of the finest cantos of " The Idylls of the King,"—especially in " The Coming of Arthur " and " The Passing of Arthur,"—there is the same refined intensity, kept strictly within the severest limits. And where this is so, we recognise in Tennyson one of the greatest artists of all time. His modernness, however, too often betrays itself by a reiteration, an emphasis of expression,—especially where the mood is one of pathos,— that verges on the morbid vein of our own too plaintive and garrulous generation.

This tendency, however, to be too microscopic and elaborate in the structure of his poems of pathos, is itself the secret of his strength when he takes a theme like that of " In Memoriam," and devotes all his great powers to the task of delineating the various phases of human grief, when he confronts us with the dismay and doubts to which it gives rise, and shows us the con- viction that springs ultimately out of them, if they are fairly faced, that the deeper affections have a future before them of which death is only the beginning. In a poem of this kind, great delicacy and minuteness of treatment, and great power of expatiating on all the various phases of doubt and faith, is absolutely necessary, if the poem is to be a perfect one. And probably no poem of the kind has ever been written which succeeds so completely in throwing a glorious rainbow upon the black cloud. " In Memoriam" would have lost half its value if it had not struck all the chords of a pro- foundly patient and tenacious sorrow, and dwelt on the blank despair, the tremulous hope, the humility of love, the tyranny of the senses, the insurrection of the conscience against that tyranny, the testimony of the spirit, the indomitable elasticity of faith, with all the vividness and freshness of a great imagi. nation and an intellect of a candour and courage of something like prophetic calibre. When has the humility of love, in dwelling on a friend's higher state of being, ever before been painted with such strength and tenderness as in itself to more than compensate the supposed inequality of the two natures so compared P-

" He past ; a soul of nobler tone ;

My spirit loved, and loves him yet Like some poor girl whose heart is set On one whose rank exceeds her own.

In mixing with his proper sphere,

She finds the baseness of her lot, Half jealous of she knows not what, And envying all that meet him there.

Ths little village looks forlorn ; She sighs amid her narrow days, Moving about the household ways, In that dark house where she was born.

The foolish neighbours come and go And tease her till the day draws by; At night she weeps, How vain am I ! How should he love a thing so low ? '" And where in all Literature has the protest of the spirit against the triumph of physical Nature over its higher life, been conceived and expressed with so much intensity as in this great poem, of which even the following splendid lines are hardly more than an average specimen :— " And he, shall he, Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fangs of fruitless prayer, . . ..... . . Who lov'd, who suffer'd countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or seal'd within the iron hills ? "

How many of those who followed Lord Tennyson to his grave in the great Abbey on Wednesday must have been haunted, as was the present writer, by the deep passion of that indignant question ! It took all Tennyson's pertinacious fidelity, all the passion of his devoted love, all the patience of his plaintive- ness, to give to the world such a poem as his " In Memoriam " on the early death of Arthur Hallam. His favourite minor key, swelling at the close into the exultation of victorious faith, was the true setting for that rosary of grief.

There is a good deal more difference of feeling about the spiritual element in "The Idylls of the King." King Arthur has not been a favourite with many of the best critics, though it is easy to discern that it was half in memory of the glorified friend of his youth, and only half in honour of the hero of the Round Table, that Tennyson's Idylls were conceived and executed. It is very difficult to delineate a per- fect nature,—at least, in a mere man,—without exciting the grudging spirit which takes umbrage at any assumption of sanctity ; and it may perhaps be admitted that in the closing scene of " Guinevere," Arthur does assume too much of the stainlessness and sinlessness which belonged only to one who was more than man. But even with this admission, we believe that " The Idylls of the King " contain a wonder- fully fine " romance of eternity," to use an expression of M. Renan's,—which he misapplies to something much greater than any romance,—and that the picture of the faith and failure, and especially of the faith in failure, of the King, contains one of the noblest of the many noble though imperfect poetic ideals of oar day. The warnings with which Arthur opens the quest for the holy grail, and the foreboding vision of the collapse of his kingdom with which he sums up the story of these self-consuming or defeated hopes, seem to us the finest possible comments on the craving of enthusiasts for religious excitement, which the spiritual wisdom of man has ever uttered. We quote the closing words of the passage in which Arthur insists that the excessive enthusiasm of mystics has wrecked the reign of law and righteousness, and yet claims for himself visions more than they all,—but visions meant to strengthen for, not to distract from, the true work of life :-

" And some amour, you held that if the King

Had seen the sight, he would have sworn the vow : Not easily, seeing that the King must guard That which he rules, and is but as the hind To whom a space of land is given to plough, Who may not wander from the allotted field Before his work be done; but being done Let Visions of the night, or of the day Come as they will ; and many a time they come Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, This air that smites his forehead is not air,

But vision,—yea his very hand and foot—

In moments when he feels he cannot die, And knows himself no vision to himself, Nor the high God a vision, nor that One Who rose again; ye have seen what ye have seen."

That, we have the means of knowing, was more or less a transcript of Tennyson's own experience. It witnesses to

something like the same experience of the nothingness of all material things which Wordsworth claimed for himself in the great " Ode on the Intimations of Immortality." And the picture of the impending moral catastrophe in "The Last Tournament" is still grander. There we see the moral ana- logue of "ragged rims of thunder brooding low, and shadow streaks of rain." Whatever may be the shortcomings in the

picture of Arthur, "The Idylls of the King" seem to us to contain a most powerful delineation of the various conflicts between earthly passions and spiritual aims. If the literary perfection be less complete than that of " In Memoriam," the design was richer, and covered a much wider field.

And Tennyson's ideal of spiritual life included not only the individual, but the nation. No one can read these visions of the Arthurian kingdom without being conscious that the poet's eye was fixed on the spiritual ambitions and the spiritual shrinkings and timidities of his own country and his own day. Indeed, he expressly says so in his epilogue addressed to the Queen. His sympathy with deeds of valour makes the English heart beat higher. His dread of anything like national insincerity or unmanly self-distrust raised the courage and daring of his fellow-countrymen to their proper level. And he ended his Idylls with one of the finest ex-

hortations to his own people which our language contains:— "The loyal to their Crown Are loyal to their own far sons, who love Our ocean-empire with her boundless homes For ever-broadening England, and her throne In our vast Orient, and one isle, one isle That knows not her own greatness; if she knows And dreads it, we are fall's."

Never was Tennyson greater than when he spoke for the nation with something like the authority of one conscious of the nation's reverence and trust.

But perhaps the highest point which Tennyson's poetry ever reached was in those exquisite little lyrics which test the inspiration of a poet more even than more massive struc- tures. He was not great in drama, though his insight into ruling passions and purposes, especially when dealing with the simpler and rougher and more massive character of half- developed natures, was profound, as is shown by his sketch of the " Grandmother," of the two " Northern Farmers," and of the " Northern Cobbler," who conquers his passion for drink by boldly confronting the tempter day after day in the shape of a great bottle of gin. But these were the inci- dental triumphs of a great poet. For the most part, his concrete characters are not powerful. His figures have no wealth of life in them, and their actions do not carry you on.

But though on ground of this kind he could not touch the hem of Shakespeare's garment, the little songs with which the

dramas and the longer poems are interspersed are, for beauty, tenderness, and sweetness, quite Shakespearian. And they have, moreover, very frequently a singularly dramatic effect,— Fair Rosamond's little song, for instance, in Becket :- "Rainbow, stay,

Gleam upon gloom, Bright as my dream Rainbow, stay !

But it passes away, Gloom upon gleam, Dark as my doom- 0 rainbow stay."

It is the same with the lovely song, " Come into the garden, Maud,"—perhaps the most perfect of its kind in English literature,—and Enid's song, " Turn, fortune, turn thy wheel," and with Maid Marian's song, "Love flew in at the window," in his Foresters. There is singular beauty and even dra- matic effect in that song, as there is in all Tennyson's songs,—only they are all the songs of a musing and meditative fancy, not of a wild and free imagination. Milton spoke of Shakespeare as " Sweetest Shakespeare,

Fancy's child," warbling " his native wood-notes wild." That description would never have applied to Tennyson. His wood-notes are not wild. They are, perhaps, even more beautiful, but they are also less simple. They are, to Shakespeare's songs, what the garden rose is to the wild rose,—richer, fuller, more wonderful works of art, but with less of that exquisite singleness of effect which conquers by its very modesty. Tennyson's songs are miracles of gaiety or pathos, or wonder or grief ; especially of grief. Our language has never elsewhere reached the special beauty of his " Tears, idle tears," or his "Break, break, break ; " nor for magic of sound has the spell of his "Blow, bugles, blow" ever been commanded by another. But even these perfect blossoms of song are all the growth of highly complex conditions of thought or feeling, which show themselves in the elaborate delicacy and harmony of their structure. High culture is of the very essence of Tennyson's poetry, be it picture, or playful reverie, or love, or sorrow, or self-reproach. He is, indeed, the living refutation of Carlyle's theory that genius is never self-conscious. Without clear self-consciousness, there could never have been a Tennyson, and therefore, without clear self-consciousness, one of the highest types of genius would be impossible.