WEIGHING TENNYSON.
IIAVE we any sure clue by which to measure the true greatness of the Poets of our own age,—any artifice by which we can relieve ourselves from the pressure of the present, and judge the greatest products of our literature by a standard wider than that of our immediate sympathies and slowly engendered tastes ? There is a double difficulty in the matter,— not merely to set ourselves free from the exclusive domination of temporary influences, but also, when we have done so, to estimate fairly the charm which those temporary influences may rightly exercise over future ages, ages not subjected to them in anything like equal degree. There can be no doubt, for instance, that there is something in the age of Chaucer and the age of Shakespeare, and the age even of Pope and of Goldsmith, which now gives a special flavour to the writings of those various authors, but which did not half so much attract their contemporaries, because it was to them an imperceptible atmosphere, part of their very lives ; while it is, to us, perceptible, unique, and attractive, just because it is not the echo of our own every-day thoughts, because it is so different from them, because it calla into life parts of our nature which are generally too little active, because it transports us into a new world. The exquisite charm of such lines as Shakespeare's, is in some measure, no doubt, one which Shakespeare's contemporaries felt as deeply as we can, but in seine measure also we do not doubt it is due to the refreshment of a mode of metaphor that would be strained, unnatural, and entirely out of date now, yet which bears on it the impress of ease, nature, and timeliness as it runs from Shakespeare's lips. Thus, in standing on tip-toe, as it were, to try and steal a march on the judgment of posterity as to the poets of our own day, we are, as it seems to us, almost, if not quite, as likely to depreciate them unduly through a too low estimate of the special qualifications of the time for grasping some aspect of life with force and beauty, as to over-estimate them through undue sympathy with temporary currents of thought. We are told that "the serious critic can put himself outside folks' various likings and preferences ; he is not bound by the average tastes of his time ; all literature is open to him, and he approaches the measure of any new poetical claimant with the standard left by the productions of bygone centuries." No doubt he does, but this is almost as much his difficulty as his privilege. The " serious critic" comes to such a task saturated with the literature of his own age, and rather weary of it. He soaks himself in other literatures, and is like a man travelling in a new country. Every new feature delights him ; the absence of any old feature is a stimulus to his imagination. He depreciates that with which he is familiar. He feasts himself on that which is fresh and fall of intellectual surprises. Of course the danger is that he will run down the true greatness which has made the mind and imagination of his age what it is, and extol those other secrete of true greatness for which he has been hungering without any fall satisfaction.
There is a curious instance of this sort of error in two articles which have appeared in separate quarters during the last week or two, both more or less leading a sort of reaction against the high modern estimate of Tennyson. The new number of the Quarterly Review, in an article of a good deal of literary ability, and not in any way intended as an assault upon Tennyson, still curiously enough denies him originality of intellect and comprehensiveness of grasp ; while a paper in the May number of the Temple Bar Magazine, written with much force and knowledge, but with rather a hackneyed bumptiousness,—an Old Bailey Chaffenbrass style of aggressiveness—(as if the writer had previously bound himself by an oath to " do for" the idolatry of Tennyson), goes so far as to cheapen Tennyson down to the standard of a mere minor poet. He tells us that Tennyson is 41 not a great poet, unquestionably not a poet of the first rank, all but unquestionably not a poet of the second rank, and probably, though no contemporary can settle that,—not even at the head of poets of the third rank, among whom ha must ultimately take his place." This might be true, for it is so very vague that we scarcely know its meaning. First-rate might be one of three or four poets of universal fame, secondrate one of ten or a dozen, and probably in such a sense Tennyson would be neither. But we know what the writer means when we come to detail. He appears to condemn " the universally Jabbered opinion " (why this vulgar anger? it does not add te the strength of the paper) that Tennyson is greater than Scott. To us he seems a great poet, and Scott hardly more than a spirited and stirring versifier. But, in this writer's view, Tennyson is only a garden poet, not a poet of nature in the larger sense at all. He has, we learn, a " dainty and delicious " muse, and " a Pegasus with very decent legs, small elegant head, right well groomed, and an uncommonly good mane and tail, but a Pegasus without wings." The critic goes on to say of Tennyson, " Alas, he is no eagle ! as we have said, he never soars ! He twitters under our roof, sweeps and skims round and round our ponds, is musical on the branches of our trees, plumes himself on the edges of our fountains, builds himself a warm nest under our gables and even in our hearts, cheeps,' to use his own words, twenty million loves, feeds out of our hands, eyes us askance, struts along our lawns, and flutters in and out our flowery pastures, does all in fact that welcome, semidomesticated, swallows, linnets, and musical bullfinches do, but there it ends." Such is the curiously false estimate which this confident, conceited, somewhat coarse, though often eloquent and vigorous writer gives us of Tennyson, through a rash use of that comparative method of which we have spoken of the difficulties already. To a certain extent the Quarterly reviewer, to a much greater extent this slashing critic in Temple Bar, in whom we seem to recognize a writer of some name, seems to us vastly to underrate his genius, and to do so mainly because that genius is so near his mind's eye, and has affected the whole life of the day so powerfully, that he cannot even take in its outline. To our care, the description of a dainty cabinet-picture maker, of a tame singing bird haunting trim gardens, has about as much true application to Tennyson as it would have to Goethe, perhaps rather lees.
The great blunder which the critic of whom we speak makes in his estimate of Tennyson, and in a less degree the much juster critic in the Quarterly, seems to us to be this,—that in that abstract way which has so little of real instinctivenesa in it, each of them compares him with other poets of quite different and more rapid or passionate genius,—and building on an implicit assumption, not fairly realized, much less examined and sustained, that rapidity, or passion, is the great criterion of great poets, classes him hastily with the smaller poets because he is found to be wanting in these qualities. But not only are there very great poetical faculties indeed which do not need rapidity and what is here meant by passion, but there are some which are hardly consistent with them. And one of the greatest of these qualities seems to us Tennyson's distinguishing, mastering, pervading characteristic,—we mean the imaginative faculty which corresponds to the microscope, rather than the telescope, in its treatment of human feeling, and instead of sweeping a wide horizon, and compressing much into little by the swiftness of its glance, keeps the object-glass fixed on one point, and compresses much into little by the fullness and variety and minuteness of its accumulations. This seems to us not merely Tennyson's tendency, but the tendency in an even higher degree of the younger contemporaries of Tennyson,—of Matthew Arnold and of Clough. It is to our minds simply silly to say that because a great poet does not fly like Shelley in the thin air between earth and sky, or thunder like Byron in his passion, or muse like Wordsworth in his solitary rapture, he is destitute of the higher poetic gifts, nay, is even a sort of effeminate petit-maitre in poetry, which is almost what the Temple Bar critic implies. What can be more masculine, severely defined, strongly grasped, more directly built on the solid rock of human nature, that Tennyson's Northern Farmer,—which this presumptuous critic wholly ignores, venturing even to assert that since 1842 " he has added no fresh laurels, in kind, to his brow ?" The Northern Farmer was not only new in kind, but a picture that may well be held to outshine almost all Chaucer's grand portraits of his Canterbury pilgrims ; and we will say with confidence that it is an absolute and final answer to that attempt which has been so elaborately made to paint Mr. Tennyson as a dainty and all but conventional poet. The poet who could draw as he has drawn the Northern Farmer cannot but be at bottom a poet of bold, hardy, and masculine genius, however tropical and luxuriant the overgrowth which often half conceals it. And that this is his true essence, we do not need even the Northern Farmer to prove beyond question. Would not that daring, original, and powerful, if painful poem, The Death Of Lucretius alone have proved it ?—a poem of a harder fibre, and far more thoughtful and full of genuine study than anything which Byron ever attempted, not to say produced. Indeed, the same might be said of either Tithonus or Ulysses, poems both of them unequalled in any other poet for the clear dominion of a ruling idea, and the sharp perfection of its execution (free altogether from the excess of detail by which Tennyson so often hides, only too successfully, the masculine, strongly marked type beneath). The truth seems to be that the writer in the Temple Bar
has no power to enter into Tennyson's highest work. When he speaks of the Gardener's Daughter,—perfect as in its way it is,— as marking the high-tide line of his genius, the " smashing " critic smashes not Tennyson, but himself. Even the Quarterly reviewer seems to us to show a remarkable want of insight when he speaks of Tennyson's genius as almost feminine, and as showing the power of compression without the power of comprehension. If any woman had written any one of the four poems we have just named, what would have been the criticism upon her'?—simply that she had absolutely overleaped all the imagined (and possibly imaginary) bounds of feminine genius ; that she had produced a bold, massive, terse, absolutely perfect piece of poetic sculpture. 'Ulysses' has, we admit, a dash of the modern in him. He is not absolutely Greek,—he speaks of all experience as But no figure was ever hewn out by a sculptor, in expression so perfect and form so stately. Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Goethe have nothing to equal it. That and cherishing an irrepressible scorn for his tame, domestic-minded son, the blameless Telemachus —that ' Ulysses' is a figure that will live in literature as long as literature is, and which it argues sheer dullness in the eye of any critic not to have recognized, with its various compeers, as marking the highest point literature has yet reached in severe and stately intellectual delineation.
Tennyson's greatness will, as we believe, be in many respects estimated by future generations as we are never likely to recognize it, though much of the popularity of his Gardener's Daughter, his May Queen, his Lucfsley Hall, and so forth, will undoubtedly pass away with the generation in whose tone of sentiment these are somewhat minute studies,—even perhaps overloaded with small ornament. He is the first and greatest of the true student poets, as the Quarterly Review justly observes, though Clough at least has written some things which even Tennyson will never equal. And by the true student poets we do not mean purely introspective poets,—on the contrary, no poet ever lived who can paint external landscape with the sure and rapid hand of Tennyson,—but those poets who have studied the limits of human knowledge, and know how to discriminate with subtle and accurate touch the false from the true, the showy from the substantial, in their own hearts and minds, and in the human world as well. Byron did not know this. Half his poetry at least is spurious stuff, with all its magnificent force. His Giaours and his Chiide Harolds are buckram heroes. It was not till he got into his cynical vein and wrote Don Juan that he rose clear of the rubbish, the false stuff, in himself. Shelley never even tried for a moment to disentangle the mystical falsetto element in himself from the pure ethereal poetry. He is wild, sweet, eerie, supernatural, but he is never real. Wordsworth is meditative, but has no discriminating self-knowledge. Of all poets that ever lived, Tennyson is the greatest in painting human moods with a richness and subtlety of insight that a hair's-breadth of deviation would have spoiled. There is no human regret and yearning in our language equal to this
Break, break, break, On thy cold grey stones, 0 sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me !
Oh, well for the fisherman's boy That he shouts with his sister at play! Oh, well for the sailor lad That he sings in his boat on the bay And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill ; But oh, for the touch of a vanished hand And the sound of a voice that is still !
Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, 0 sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me."
Shelley's :— "When the lamp is shattered the light in the dust lies dead, When the cloud is scattered the rainbow's glory is fled," expresses a far wilder and more desolate mood, as of one shivering in the dark wilderness ; but it is not so yearning and so human a mood as Tennyson's, whose greatness it is to be always sell_ possessed, even when most possessed by waves of emotion which he can neither sound nor measure. With what a firm and selfpossessed sculptor's hand he carves out the vagrant longings and breaking threads of thought in that variable elation and depression of mood due to wine, in his marvelously fine poem, Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue ! Beneath that apparently wandering hand, there is as firm and sure and over-mastering a conception as runs through his Tithonus, or his Ulysses, or his Lucretius-, or his Two Voices, or his In Memoriam, or his Northern Farmer. For the painting and sculpture of moods which require the fullest insight into a rich and complex nature, no poet, to our knowledge, has ever lived to rival Tennyson. No doubt to an ordinary eye the field of view is small, but it is not small under Tennyson's treatment. It is so full, fetches so real and true an illustration from an hundred sources, and follows so unflinchingly the true lines of nature even beneath all this tangle of detail, that yon might as well call the Laocoon a small subject of art, as give that name to Tennyson's greatest themes. Where precisely he stands in the hierarchy of poets we do not feel either the power or the inclination to determine,—certainly we should say below Wordsworth ; perhaps below Byron and Shelley ; certainly above Keats. But of one thing we are very sure, that the critics of future times will not even try him by the teats of the somewhat rash and pretentious critic in the Temple Bar ; and will see in him some far greater qualities than any that are indicated even in the criticism of the Quarterly Review.
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