BOOKS.

A NEW STUDY OF TENNYSON.* IT is a very long time since we have come upon a volume of criticism which is so sane, and at the same time so fresh and stimulating, as the one before us. Tennyson's poems are to this generation so familiar that it is by no means an easy task to judge them on their merits, and younger men are so

apt to over-estimate the work of their immediate contem- poraries that we should hardly have been surprised if Mr. Gwynn had shown himself a little out of sympathy with

what delighted and satisfied an older generation. But we find, on the contrary, that the criticism is remarkably sympa- thetic; Mr. Gwynn has pat himself at the poet's point of view, and has succeeded in writing an appreciation which the most devout admirer may read with pleasure, and at the same time with profit. For Mr. Gwynn will in many cases have given him reasons for the admiration that was before only instinctive.

The chapter from which it will be most easy to illustrate Mr. Gwynn's merit as a critic is that entitled "The Poems," in which he treats of the great mass of Tennyson's lyrical work :—

" The greatest of his pure lyrics are to be found, I think, in Maud and In Memoriam, and with these must be ranked with- out a single exception all the songs in The Princess. Tears, idle tears is unique in the language. Browning's One Word More and Lamb's delightful lines on the old familiar faces' are poems, in a sense lyrical, that dispense with rhyme ; Collins's Ode to Evening has been much praised for the melody of its versification. But none of these is like Tears, idle tears, which has the absolute movement and quality of song, not less than even such verses as

• The splendour falls on castle walls,' where everything is done by an elaborate system of single and double rhymes, and by repeated refrains, to suggest music to the ear. And apart from the haunt- ing charm of the verse, there is poetry of the subtlest kind in this new expression of the thought that Virgil puts so inimitably in his

lacrinam rerum et mentem mortal's tangunt.'"

Again

"Break, break, break will always be admirable ; so will Flow down, cold rivulet, to the iea, and the two lovely stanzas called Requiescat • Tennyson: a Critteat Study. By Stephen Gwynn. London ; Blackle and Son. LS& ad.]

'Fair is her cottage in its place,

Where yon broad water sweetly, slowly glides,

It sees itself from thatch to base Dream in the sliding tides.

And fairer she, but all how soon to die !

Her quiet dream of life this hour may cease.

Her peaceful being slowly passes by To some more perfect peace.'

It is worth while looking close here to observe the skill with which the studied irregularity of metre is used. The ten- syllable line, introduced in the first stanza to suggest the slow movement of the river, is caught up in the second as if the life were being gradually borne irresistibly out to sea."

Again :—

"Finest of all the ballads is the great poem upon Sir Richard Grenville and his Revenge. The form, by no means a common one, was almost certainly suggested by Browning's Hand Biel, but Serve Biel, though a spirited poem, has no claim to rank with Tennyson's magnificent work. The inequalities of the metre which with Browning made a series of roughnesses are by Tennyson used with the finest effect to mark transitions in the intensity of the narrative, and nothing could exceed the skill with which in the last stave he gives the movement of the storm, rising ever higher and higher in attack upon the fleet, till at last there came the final downward plunge, and all was lone water, a waste immensity of waves : And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags, To be lost evermore in the main.'

This, with the Charge of the Light Brigade, probably makes up the only ballad work of Tennyson which posterity will care about."

Once more, about the two Northern Farmers :— "This portrait (the Farmer ad style) is as living and dramatic as the other ; it is also what the other is not—a poem. There is essential poetry in the presentment of the rough old brute (so Fitz-Gerald called him), with his strong hold on life, and his stolid contempt of death. • The whole man and his life are there, crowded into less than seventy lines; and there also is the unconscious poetry of the life These two poems (but especially the one which is a poem) must be counted among the elect handful of Tennyson's work. You cannot estimate him fairly without reference to them, for no man working in verse has exceeded them in humorous creative power since Shakespeare. I would put the man who stubbed Thornaby waste' beside Ulysses just as confidently as a Rembrandt by a Greek statue."

All that seems to us excellently said. To only one passage in

this admirable chapter would we take exception, and that is to Mr. Gwynn's estimate of Tithonus. He says this poem

"can scarcely rank with Tnone and Ulysses, for the simple reason that it is a masterpiece of style and nothing beyond that." We should ourselves rank Ulysses immeasurably above CEnone; but that is by the way. What we object to is Mr.

Gwynn's curious assumption that Tithonus does not deal with any real human passion. The desire of old age for death is

naturally not so common as that of youth for love, or middle age for fresh enterprise, because extreme senility is the lot of

comparatively few, but it is a real, and sometimes a very pas- sionate, desire; and it is a little remarkable that a critic of Mr. Gwynn's insight, even if he had never met with it, should not have perceived its possibility.

The chapter on "Tennyson's Political Opinions" strikes us as putting the case with great fairness; that on his religious opinions is perhaps too short and sketchy to do justice to the subject, which would require an essay to itself. We notice two or three slips in interpretation in Mr. Gwynn's analysis of the In Memorians. We do not recall anything in that poem about a "fear of howling winds that may be toss- ing and harrying the poor ghost." It looks as if Mr. Gwynn had taken the fifteenth elegy as addressed to Hallam's spirit, instead of to the ship that was bringing home his body. The present writer makes the suggestion because he once heard a distinguished Dublin professor so take the passage, but he was successful in convincing him of his error, and we have confi- dence that a second reading will convince Mr. Gwynn, if, indeed, that is the origin of the remarkable statement above quoted.

Nor do we see any ground for Mr. Gwynn's assertion that the Mary of the thirty-second elegy is "identified in imagination with the poet's sister, Hallam's bride that should have been." It is, on the contrary, very noteworthy how that lady was ignored by the poet, even in the poem that pro- fessedly treated of her marriage. The main outcome of the marriage, according to the poet, was that the two brothers-in- law were to become "a single soul." Mr. Gwynn's interpreta- tion, too, of the first verse of all seems to us impossible. He takes the rising "on stepping-stones of our dead selves" to imply the theological truth of immortality, whereas it must mean in the context a spiritual rising above a lower moral state. But these are slight blemishes, and affect only a few pages of the book. Attention may be called, in conclusion, to the very suggestive chapter upon Tennyson's style. Mr. Gwynn lays stress on the poet's un- exampled dexterity in the use of words, especially his extra- ordinary power of using them to suggest sound and motion in

his pictures of landscape, as in the famous line of Maud- " Listening now to the tide, in its broad-flung ship-wrecking roar, Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave ; "

or the autumn scene in In Memoriam-

" The rooks are blown about the sky."

This is a power which no living poet has given any sign of possessing except Mr. Bridges, who in his pictures of motion comes very close to Tennyson. But higher than these gifts Mr. Gwynn rightly ranks one which he calls the quality of "magical suggestion ":—

"This," he says, "is something even higher than the Horatian felicity of expression which packs a definite thought into words that become inseparable from it, like the Rectius rives Ode : yet in Horace too you can match it with a passage- ' Nos ubi decidimus

Quo pater Aeneas, quo dives Tullus et AnewS Pulvis et umbra sumus:

Lines like these can never be adequately translated. That is where one cannot be sure about a contemporary. Will any lines in Tennyson have this magical suggestion, this imperish- able accent ? I seem to hear it in Ulysses, I seem to hear it in Tears, idle tears. I seem to hear it in the germinal lines of Maud:—

Oh, that 'twere possible, After long grief and pain, To find the arms of my true love Round me once again I'

Where do the words come from ? we ask ourselves over lines-like these. What is there in them that should stir vague hopes and long-forgotten regrets, and set all the vaults of our memory echoing ? If we had the answer we should be able to define poetry."

With this last quotation we must take leave of Mr. Gwynn's book, cordially recommending it to all lovers of poetry.