THE LYRICS OF TENNYSON.* So pleasant a task is seldom

given to a reviewer as to examine and report on this latest volume of the " Golden Treasury Series." Time has both ripened our judgment of these poems and fully justified our delight in them, so that, with the full sympathy of long acquaintance we greet them, and in this presentment of them find little, if anything, that can be amended. In his lyrics Alfred Tennyson is at his best, and these are the choicest of them ; and we may, as Englishmen, he proud that they are representative, not only of the poet's individuality, but of the masters of literature who were his con- temporaries. They mirror the finer thought and impulse of the

, • .Lyrical Poems, by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Selected and Annotated by Francis T. Palgrave. London: Macmillan and Co.

Victorian era at its prime, and in that sense they are timer witnesses to its history than" Hansard "or the Times newspaper. Though fastidious in form, and though their force is carefully reserved under the straitest canons of art, in them more than in any poetry of this century, is expressed the quality of English temper, the tender sentiment and sense of reverent duty, the love of country even to its slightest wild-flower, the profound, if vague, faith in the Power that "makes for righteousness," the double nature, half Puritan half Cavalier, which shows itself whenever Englishmen are wrought to serious action. It is time frankly to recognise the debt that English-speaking races owe to Alfred Tennyson. No other poet of the century has so influenced the daily life of the best among us ; and while in full sympathy with the throb of thought and emotion in its almost feverish rapidity during our epoch, he has steadily maintained our best national traditions of pure and stately life. Under his lightest verses always lies respect for law and limitation. No doubt criticism could find material for its exercise in Tennyson's dramas ; even his miniature epics and social satires are rather masques than earnest dealings with the tragedy of human life ; but we have now the best of his work before us, and thankful recognition of its high value is better than criticism. Enthusiastic admiration is a mood we too little allow ourselves ; let us for once be entirely cordial, and not only linger on the sweetness of these lyrics, but confess the steadfast and consistent power of their author.

Mr. Lowell has said, "The highest office of a great poet is to show us how much variety, freshness, and opportunity abides in the obvious and familiar," and no one has studied the higher poetry with keener or more loving instinct than has Mr. Lowell. Again he says, " Every age says to its poets, like a mistress to her lover, Tell me what I am like,' and he who succeeds in catching the evanescent expression that reveals character- whichis as much as to say what is intrinsically human—will be found to have caught something as imperishable as human nature itself." In this volume, we see how the Cambridge scholar, the lover of the past, grew to be the lover of what is "intrinsically human" in our complex and somewhat chaotic present, when, with all our cant about the artistic trinity,—beauty, good, and truth,—we have much confounded their persons and divided their substance, thereby weakening our faith in all ideals, and incidentally starving our perception of humour which rests on that faith, and the contrasts of our life to it. How little sincere humour is there among us ! Too little even in our chief poet's work,—large as is the humour of the two Northern Farmers and other pieces in the same key,—but it is less missed in his lyrics than in his dramatic poetry.

The editor of this volume, by grouping these poems according to their subjects, has as far as he could dissociated them from their author's mental growth ; but it is easily traceable in the simpler and profounder meanings of his later lyrics when contrasted with the eclectic experimentalism of what he published before In Menwrianz. In them, the laboratory is too perceptible ; but no archaisms or twists of phrase disturb the serene power of" Em mie," published in 1880. Its intense humanity is direct as a gospel story, and it is not overwrought with ornaments that, however exquisite in themselves, distract our sympathy. In it we have a standard by which to judge even the delightful "May Queen," and to learn how accuracy in landscape detail tends to assume undue importance in contemporary art, whether of the pen or the brush, whenever by it man is made of less importance than his environment. No one better than Tennyson knows that :—

"not for this Was common clay ta'en from the common earth, Moulded by God and tempered with the tears Of angels to the perfect shape of man."

But be, though in this as in all reticent and strong, yielded somewhat in his earlier poems to the spirit of the day, eagerly accepting the reformation worked by the Lakists, and the revolt of Shelley against the barren egotism of the eighteenth century, when the universe was regarded as a mere timekeeper for man's greater convenience.

Yet it is true that only by sympathy with man can a poet gain immortality among men, and no perfection of musical verse, no breadth of knowledge, can earn more than acknowledgment of talent and learning, unless soul touch soul in a common confession of joy and sorrow. Poetry that is not the overflow, of human emotion is but rhymed prose, and, according to the nobleness of the emotion and its universality, will be the fame of the poet. While Tennyson wrote of dreams and un- imaginable persons of a mystic world, it remained uncertain if be would turn out to be one of England's true immortals ; but even then no poet had been more skilful in the use of words or more conversant with all sources of the European fount of song. Forty years ago he was master of repetition and alliteration, cadence and pause, and of that adjustment of sound to sense which is so effective in rousing enthusiasm. Of his first poems

a writer in the Westminster Review, supposed to be Mr. J. S.

Mill, says :—" They demonstrate the possession of power, to the future direction of which we look with some anxiety. A genuine poet has deep responsibilities to his country and to the world, to the present and future generations, to earth and heaven It is not for such men to sink into mere verse-makers for the amusement of themselves or others. They can influence the associations of unnumbered minds ; they can command the sympathies of unnumbered hearts ; they can disseminate principles ; they can give those principles power over men's imaginations ; they can excite in a good cause the sustained enthusiasm that is sure to conquer ; they can blast the laurels of the tyrants and hallow the memories of the martyrs of patriotism ; they can act with a force, the extent of which it is difficult to estimate, upon national feelings and character, and consequently upon national happiness." That these collected lyrics go far to fulfil these words is, we think, tree, though Tennyson has touched other strings than those suggested, and has been in closer sympathy than Mr. Mill

with some phases of English nature, less obvious, perhaps, when the Westminster Review was in the front rank of criticism, but not the less important. Tennyson has faced alike

scepticism and superstition in their recurrent modes ; be has, true to his faith in a progress which has already assimilated all that is best in the past, held aloof from the pagan renaissance, which has led some of our artists astray in recent years ; he has not feared the encroachment of science in every region of thought, and yet with advancing years his poetry rang ever truer to religion, nearer to God, and in that nearness nearer to man, so that the realities of human life became more present to him, and its surroundings receded to their due proportions ; cultivated scholarship gave place to intuition of beauty, and airy speculation was sobered into such direct tragedy as the ballads of The Revenge" and " Rizpah," such simple pathos as is in the " Grandmother " and the "Cobbler." Popularity has not affected, except so far as it has matured and strengthened, his genius ; but Tennyson has not always so well resisted, as in these lyrics, the prevailing mischief of over-cultivated and leisurely individuality, which wastes its power in introspection, and has little faith in existence other than its own ; but the appeal in these to our common emotions will give them enduring life.

It has been made a reproach that Tennyson's poetry can be read by girls without a shock, and those of the naturalistic school who profess that decency and reserve are forms of hypocrisy, and that tattered and ignoble passions dragged through the gutter are chief incidents in the life of the human animal, and symbols of profound truth, consider that he has narrowed too fastidiously his outlook. They place him rather on the level of Lamartine than of Victor Hugo, that

"Cloud-weaver of phantasmal hopes and fears," the "stormy voice of France." There can, indeed, be no com-

parison between the blusteringly powerful antagonist of what is, and the English champion of law and divine order, who, not indifferent to the mystery of pain, still trusts that

"Good shall fall

At last—far off—at last to all ;"

and while not less eager that New-Year bells should "ring out the darkness of the land," adores "with faith that comes of self- control" Him "that with us works." The great Frenchman may have had the more spacious brain, but in it pious and impious thought wrestled for utterance with doubtful issue. Titan he is for the most part, and seldom Olympian, and it is only the serene Olympians of the mountain heights who have the inherent gift of immortality. Singing of life gives life to the songs, and the life of man has its springs deeper than political change or even social revolution can reach. Man's relations with nature and with God, his ties of kin, his intuition of truths " deep- seated in our mystic frame," and of wisdom "embodied in a tale" which teaches how

"The Word had breath and wrought With human bands the creed of creeds In loveliness of perfect deeds,"

—these facts of human life it is which have given to poets who have dealt with them their immortality, from the writer of the Odyssey to Dante, from the calm master of man's moods, Shakespeare, to Tennyson, whose work, if not vast in its scope as theirs, is yet as true in its loyalty to truth.

We of this generation owe gratitude to Tennyson that he has not been of those who would "kill the Ideal," and that his conception of Freedom and Progress is the victory of the unseen but imagined good over all forms of evil, the justification of conscience, the elimination of the ape and tiger in us, the triumph of all that is meant by our stammering lips when we utter the Holy Name. If English morals be, as is said, ener- vated; if Englishmen are drifting from their old anchors into shadows, it is still the hopefullest of signs that the lyrics of Tennyson should supply as they do so many household words in our threatened homes.

Detailed analysis of the delightful and various art of our chief singer has been abundantly attempted, with repeated and similar verdicts ; but if we had wished to go over the old ground, this volume is not ample enough for conclusive criti- cism, and some of his most triumphant lines are not here. We do not complain of its size. It is a sufficient manual of beauty and wisdom to guide us to the "shining table-lands," whither we are led through daisied mead and tangled brake and rippling watercourses, now by tender, now by reproving words ; by bugle. calls, as in the Balaclava Charge, or by suggestions of the mysteries among which man moves, as in the "Two Voices" and the "Vision of Sin." To win us through "the sensuous organism" to faith in "that which is higher ;" to prove that, as Michael Angelo taught, "Esser diviso non puo '1 bel del eterno ;" to imagine truth, and reconcile material with spiritual beauty in the most polished English used since the spirit in Comas fled "higher than the starry chime," and the purest since our Bible was translated, — is Tennyson's claim to immortality. Who shall question it ?