The Catholic World, Vol. 22, October, 1875, to March, 1876 / A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE OF General Literature and Science.
VOL. XXII. OCTOBER, 1875, TO MARCH, 1876.
NEW YORK: THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION HOUSE, 9 Warren Street. 1876.



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.
Mr. Tennyson has achieved a great reputation as a lyric poet. He urges now a higher claim. In the sunset of a not inglorious life, when we should have expected his lute to warble with waning melodies and less impassioned strains, he lays it aside as too feeble for his maturer inspirations, and, as though renewed with the fire of a second youth, he draws to his bosom a nobler instrument, and awakes the echoes of sublimer chords. He has grown weary of the lyric
“hœrentem multa cum laude coronam,”
and with some confidence claims the dramatic bays. Nay, he even invites a comparison with Shakspere. True to the temper of the times, his prestige follows him in so hazardous a competition, the accustomed wreaths are showered upon him with unreflecting haste, and the facile representatives of the most incapable of critics—public opinion—have already offered him that homage as a dramatist which had already been too lavishly offered to his idyllic muse.
It is an ungrateful task to go against the popular current, and it is an ungracious one to object to crowns which the multitude have decreed. But there is no help for it, unless we would stoop to that criticism of prestige which is so characteristic of the age, and would follow in the wake of the literary rabble, criticising the works by the author, instead of the author by his works.
The sensations provoked by his poetry resemble those of one who has sauntered through a museum of precious stones of rare workmanship and purest water. Our æsthetic taste has been pleased by the glitter and the color and the brilliance, but our mind and heart have not been deeply moved. His poems are ablaze with detached thoughts of lofty meaning, and of a multitude of others whose meaning is not obvious, all alike expressed in vivid imagery, in the purest phraseology, and in rare melody of rhythm. But they are confused and cabalistic. He seems to be always laboring to be incomprehensible. He calls it “the riddling of the bards.” And he succeeds. The problem of the Sphinx, the emblematic warning sent by the Scythians to their Persian invader, the mute counsel sent by the Samian to the Corinthian tyrant, a Delphic oracle, all were clear and easy by comparison with Mr. Tennyson’s lyrics, alike in detached passages and in entire poems. None of woman born can fathom the meaning of the Idylls of the King .