I.
Vision, in the old Roman conception, was the distinguishing faculty of the poet. And indeed vates, not poeta, marks the fundamental condition of his art. The seer precedes the maker. It is not indispensable that he should see more than other men, but he will see more clearly. His perceptions are acute and nimble; his sensations are intense. The retina and ear-drum deliver with peculiar speed and precision their messages to his brain. His glance tracks the eagle in his circles, and numbers the hues of the western sky. He catches the whisper of fainting winds, and spells the cadence of the rippling stream. To him all outlines are sharp and crisp, every tint is vivid, every tone is clear. Senses exquisitely organized are the first essential of the poet.
Sensations are fraught with countless degrees of pleasure, with infinite shades of pain. Those objects whose ideas awaken a feeling of delight we call beautiful. To register the beautiful is an instinct of the poet. With a nice reference to the pleasure imparted, he discriminates forms, divides the chromatic scale, graduates the gamut of sound. In a word, his æsthetic judgment is wakeful and unerring. But the keenest joys of the mind are not begotten by beauty pure and simple. There is a fuller and sweeter satisfaction than that derived from kaleidoscope combinations of color, arabesques without significance, and fantasias without text or theme. Wherever design emerges, the notion of fitness is born. The Greek found it in the human body. We can trace it in the flower and the star. When we contemplate those things of which design may be predicated, there is blended with the feeling of pleasure a perception of inward adaptation. The idea of perfection is married to the idea of beauty. The ideal is their offspring. Upon it the æsthetic judgment unaided dares not pronounce. The complex faculty, whose province is the ideal, is taste. It is the second requisite of the poet.
Most persons of culture and refinement have taste in some degree. They are no strangers to the pure delight evoked by a smiling landscape. In the human form they enjoy the beauty of outline and proportion, and recognize the nice adjustment of structure to a central aim. But their joys are transient. The flower fades; sunset yields to moonlight; autumn touches with her pencil the canvas of the spring; one graceful attitude melts into another; emotions course across the countenance like winds over standing wheat. The poet comes. His mission is to chain the fleeting, to fix the evanescent, to reproduce the past. He brings you a rose with the bloom on it; calls up the buried friend; stays the sinking sun on the edge of his western bed. His life is a long revolt against the law of change. Nor is he confined to imitation. His sphere transcends realities. He may play with nature, if he will not violate her. His memory is not a store-house only, but a crucible as well, where the phenomena of sense lie fused in a glowing golden mass. Through his brain float airy shapes surpassing and yet suggesting the grace of earthly forms; ideals strange and fantastic, yet bound by subtle ties of relationship to types of the actual world. His fancy is ever in labor. Incessant gestation, incessant parturition, engage her energies. Reproduction, creation, is a law of the poet’s being. It is this which vindicates his right to the noble name of maker.
Keen senses, a just taste, creative force, compose the common dowry of artists. But art is threefold—plastic, pictorial, poetic. To each species belongs a peculiar medium in which memories are embalmed and fancies embodied. The media are solids, colors, words. In language lie certain powers and certain limitations. The poet divines them. He produces a speaking picture, but he remembers that much of a picture cannot be spoken. He demonstrates that much also may be told that cannot be painted. On his canvas vivacity and intensity do duty for light and shade. Elaboration, suggestion, silence, are the elements of his perspective. He borrows from sculpture the significance of isolation, and the incisive lesson of the group. Images, metaphors, similes, are the poet’s graving-tools. He learns their latent capacities and their inherent flaws. He secures subtle effects by climax, antithesis, evolution. He plays the chemist with ideas, and presents them in every stage of development, now vaporous, now congealed. He weighs words, detects their finer applications, and fathoms the deeper meanings which are coiled about their roots. And, finally, he masters the mechanism of speech, the organic structure of sentences, the joints and vertebræ of his native tongue. One step remains, to seize the principles of metre, the secrets of rhythm and cæsura, the march and music of verse. His panoply is finished. He is a poet.
Let us apply some of these tests to Tennyson. And, first, his power of simple imitation. At first sight this seems no lofty triumph of the poet’s art. And yet how much it implies! To translate substance into the unsubstantial. To portray the visible and tangible in that which has neither color nor dimension. Above all, to transfuse through the spirit of man the spirit of nature. It behooves him who would compass this to purge the heart of emotion, abjure self-consciousness, and forget, like the Pythian priestess, his own identity. He is not to steep his landscape in sentiment of his own, nor ascribe to it a fictitious sympathy with human moods and passions. The outward beauty he contemplates must traverse his mental atmosphere, untinctured, unrefracted, like white light. We must catch in his work the soul of the scene, a spirit rising from it like an exhalation, not drenching it with alien dews. We find a happy instance of right treatment in this cool upland valley from “Œnone”:
“There lies a vale in Ida lovelier
Than all the valleys of Ionian hills;
The swimming vapor slopes athwart the glen,
Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,
And loiters slowly drawn. On either hand
The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down
Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars
The long brook falling thro’ the cloven ravine
In cataract after cataract to the sea.
Behind the valley topmost Gargarus
Stands up and takes the morning; but in front
The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal
Troas and Ilion’s columned citadel.”
Beside this place the rank luxuriance of a tropic island where “Enoch Arden,” shipwrecked, waited for a sail:
“The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns,
And winding glades high up like ways to heaven,
The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes,
The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
The lustre of the long convolvuluses,
That coiled around the stately stems and ran
Even to the limits of the land, the glows
And glories of the broad belt of the world—
All these he saw.”
Of pure imitative art Scott and Wordsworth are the great modern masters. Yet we shall all acknowledge that the passages quoted exhibit a rare excellence. It would be hard to match in Theocritus the breezy freshness of the “Brook.” As we listen, we lose ourselves, and seem to penetrate the joyous heart of nature. We too are in Arcadia. It is the morning of the world, and the infant god of some slender streamlet hums his naïve song to Pan, who lies along the sward:
“I wind about, and in, and out,
With many a blossom sailing;
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling.
*****
I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance
Among my skimming swallows,
I make the netted sunbeams dance
Against my sandy shallows.”
We have dwelt at length on the sincerity with which Tennyson interprets nature. It is the stamp of the true poet. The dilettante, however cunning, cannot counterfeit it. He cannot keep himself out of the picture, but invests it with his own sentiment, and tricks it out in the whims and caprices of the hour. It is otherwise with Wordsworth. That high-priest of nature enters her presence reverently, with humble and candid heart. He puts off the vanities and weaknesses of man on the verge of her holy ground. From his lips her lessons fall with a simple earnestness, like oracles from the mouth of a child. Her truths he incarnates, but does not presume to clothe.
While it is false art to attribute to nature a conscious sympathy with man, it is true that she at times discovers an unconscious harmony with his moods. Our emotions are deepened by the accord. The happy are the happier for sunshine. The sad are saddest in the night and the rain. To aim at this mystic unison, to strike one note from feeling and from circumstance, is legitimate and delightful. Let us contrast an example of such treatment with the less truthful method to which we have referred. We ought always to study a theory in some felicitous expression of it, and therefore we take these graceful lines from Dr. Holmes. The stars and flowers touched by the woes of fallen man have conspired to watch and warn him. The flowers cannot bear the sight of human misery.
“Alas! each hour of daylight tells
A tale of shame so crushing,
That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,
And some are always blushing.
“But when the patient stars look down
On all their light discovers,
The traitor’s smile, the murderer’s frown,
The lips of lying lovers,
“They try to shut their saddening eyes,
And in the vain endeavor
We see them twinkling in the skies,
And so they wink for ever.”
At the first glance this moves, and pleases; because the emotion of the moment veils the extravagant hyperbole. The writer is an artist, and makes us see, as it were, through tears. But the lines do not grow upon us like the truly beautiful. As we read them a second time, there comes over us a feeling of annoyance, almost of pain, that the flowers should be misinterpreted, the stars misconstrued. We tremble before nature’s shocks and storms, and cannot afford to darken her brightest bloom or trouble her sweet serenity. Look now at this figure of “Mariana,” weeping, forsaken, “in the moated grange!” There is no pathetic prelude, no preliminary appeal to human sympathies. A neglected garden and a lonely house. A reach of level waste, colorless, silent, cold. The desolation is contagious, and just as the heart is sinking into a state of depression and despair, the moan of the stricken girl falls quivering on the ear.
“With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all;
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the peach to the garden wall.
The broken sheds looked sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch:
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, ‘My life is dreary!
He cometh not!’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’”
We are very far from saying that Tennyson is everywhere free from the pathetic fallacy. But his sins of the kind occur chiefly in some vein of sportive apologue, like the “Talking Oak,” or in the mouth of Maud’s morbid lover, half distraught by temper and wholly crazed by crime. And, indeed, if any could be pardoned for beholding in all things one image, it would be, no doubt, the lover. In the old myth, love guided the hand of art; but Pygmalion was a sculptor, not a landscape painter.
The portrayal of the human form is one of the painter’s triumphs, as it is the sole province of plastic art. Poetry, for the most part, evades a description of personal beauty, and is content with a suggestion. Yet there are two or three etchings in the “Palace of Art” which seem to us not unworthy of a place in that gallery of Philostratus which a poet’s hand repeopled:
“Or sweet Europa’s mantle blew unclasped,
From off her shoulder backward borne;
From one hand drooped a crocus, one hand grasped
The mild bull’s golden horn.
“Or else flush’d Ganymede, his rosy thigh
Half buried in the eagle’s down,
Sole as a flying star shot through the sky
Above the pillared town.”
These are mere outlines. But Tennyson has drawn one figure with almost pictorial finish and force. It is Aphrodite revealing herself to Paris on Mount Ida:
“Idalian Aphrodite, beautiful,
Fresh as the foam, new bath’d in Paphian wells,
With rosy, slender fingers, backward drew
From her warm brows and bosom her deep hair
Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat
And shoulder: from the violets her light foot
Shone rosy white, and o’er her rounded form,
Between the shadows of the vine-bunches,
Floated the glowing sunlight as she moved.”
This is genuine painting. There is form and color in it, and, withal, the spirit of beauty bathing the whole, untainted by the faintest suggestion of wanton love.
In the temple of outward nature poetry is only the acolyte of painting. But one shrine is more exclusively her own. She is mistress of the heart. Over that ocean no other wing sustains continuous flight. There are waves of impulse which canvas cannot reflect, and currents of emotion untraced by the limner’s skill. There are dainty joys and fears that mock his grasp, and gust of passion that confound his cunning. Pictorial art must read the soul in the face, and the face is at best a clouded mirror. From the poet we hide nothing. The growth of character, the drift of habit, the pressure of inherited tendencies, springs of motive, stings of appetite—he discerns and deciphers all. But he must not speak in riddles: he is bound to make his meaning clear. He owes a duty to the humblest. They look to him to lend thought a form, shadow a substance; to explain the strange by the familiar, and flood the whole with the mellow flight of fancy. The poet is, in a certain sense, what Sidney would make him, the right popular philosopher. On the success of Tennyson in this field there is some difference of opinion. The fervor of his sympathies within a certain range and the delicacy of his intuitions are unquestioned. His style is allowed to be rich in color, and often fraught with incisive force. Let us glance at some passages which depict the finer shades of feeling, or are conspicuous for felicitous expression. We will then look at the charges, so often brought against Tennyson, of obscurity and a want of dramatic power.
It is a fact of common experience that quite opposite emotions, wrought to intensity, reach a state of fusion. They move, as it were, in converging lines, and their vanishing point is pain; or rather, they have what physicists would call a common dew-point. Thus we hear of the luxury of sorrow and of love’s sweet smart. Coleridge has touched this psychic truth with extreme tenderness in “Genevieve.” He shows us the young girl rapt in a troubled wonder before the strange feeling that storms her gentle breast. Her heart flutters like a snared bird:
“Her bosom heaved, she stept aside;
As conscious of my look she stept:
Then suddenly, with timorous eye,
She fled to me and wept.”
So in one of Tennyson’s “Idylls,” the eyes of the happy Enid are suffused with tears. It is hardly possible to read the lines without loving human nature:
“He turned his face,
And kissed her climbing; and she cast her arms
About him, and at once they rode away.
And never yet, since high in Paradise,
O’er the four rivers the first roses blew,
Came purer pleasure unto mortal kind
Than lived through her who in that perilous hour
Put hand to hand beneath her husband’s heart
And felt him hers again. She did not weep,
But o’er her meek eyes came a happy mist,
Like that which kept the heart of Eden green.”
Most persons have known those transient attachments which are born of “accident, blind contact, and the strong necessity of loving.” In the “Gardener’s Daughter” some one alludes in this playful fashion to the dethroned darling of his salad days:
“Oh! she
To me myself, for some three careless moons,
The summer pilot of an empty heart
Unto the shores of nothing. Know you not
Such touches are but embassies of love,
To tamper with the feelings ere he found
Empire for life?”
Few who have read the new “Maid’s Tragedy” have forgotten “Elaine.” There is no sweeter face in story. We trace a master’s hand in the passage where a passionate sympathy holds her from her sleep, and the deep lines of Lancelot’s countenance are mirrored in her white soul:
“As when a painter, poring on a face,
Divinely through all hindrance finds the man
Behind it, and so paints it that his face,
The shape and color of a mind and life,
Lives for his children ever at its best
And fullest: so his face before her lived.”
Lancelot is always gracious to her, and grateful for her tender care, but he is moody and absent, and instinct tells her that his love can never be hers. She bears home a heavy heart:
“She murmured, ‘Vain! in vain! it cannot be;
He will not love me! how, then, must I die?’
Then, as a little, helpless, innocent bird,
That has but one plain passage of few notes,
Will sing the simple passage o’er and o’er
For all an April morning, till the ear
Wearies to hear it; so the simple maid
Went half the night repeating, ‘Must I die?’”
One more. A song of Tristram’s, rife with the graceful gayety that masks and half-redeems a faithless heart. It might have been made by Ronsard, and sung by Bussy d’Amboise. The husband of “Isolt of Brittany” and the lover of “Isolt of Britain” gives the rationale of broken vows:
“Ay, ay, O ay, the winds that bend the brier!
A star in heaven, a star within the mere.
Ay, ay, O ay, a star was my desire;
And one was far apart, and one was near!
Ay, ay, O ay, the winds that bow the grass!
And one was water, and one star was fire.
And one will ever shine, and one will pass;
Ay, ay, O ay, the winds that move the mere!”
The admirers of Byron and the poets of the Georgian era find Tennyson obscure. By obscurity they ought to mean a darkness born of confusion, the cloud of fallacy, the vagueness of incoherence. Crude thoughts, unfledged fancies, halting metaphors, are obscure. Poetasters are commonly dark, and it would be easy to show that Byron himself in his best work, the fourth canto of Childe Harold, is sometimes guilty of obscurity. And it must be admitted that some poems of Tennyson’s youth, and likewise “Maud,” are open to this objection. But if, as we believe, the charge is pointed at “In Memoriam,” “Love and Duty,” or the “Palace of Art,” then we deny its force. It may be that they who find enigmas in Paradise Lost and “In Memoriam” mistake the source of their difficulties. We incline to depreciate what we fail to comprehend. We forget that deep waters are not necessarily turbid; that novelty is not obscurity. As we climb a mountain, we gain new views of the valley beneath, yet the novel landscape may be no less vivid than the old. There is, indeed, a dulness of the ear that detects no clue to the myriad threads of harmony. There is a myoptic disease which sees nothing but indistinctness beyond its narrow horizon. In such cases the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are mystified.
We have said that the poet owes a duty to the humblest. That duty is fulfilled when he has conjured his fancies into visible shapes, and given truth a concrete form. He is not called upon to find eyes for the blind, or learning for the ignorant. It is enough if at his banquet there is food for all stomachs. The poet owes a duty not to the humble only.
There are, for example, two methods by which poetry may illuminate history. It may invest personal character with the truth and vigor of life, and portray detached scenes in correct and brilliant colors. Or it may reveal to the imagination by exact and felicitous metaphor the sequence of events, the march of knowledge, the drift of opinion, and the “long result of time.” Thus Lucan poetized a narrative, Lucretius thinks in imagery. We recall no better illustration of the former treatment than the fine stanza from Childe Harold:
“When Athens’ armies fell at Syracuse,
And fettered thousands bore the yoke of war,
Redemption rose up in the Attic muse,
Her voice their only ransom from afar.
See as they chant the tragic hymn, the car
Of the o’ermastered victor stops; the reins
Fall from his hands; his idle scymitar
Starts from its belt; he rends his captive’s chains,
And bids him thank the bard for freedom and his strains.”
The anecdote is a noble one, and has gained nobility in the telling. But anecdotes after all are not the marrow of history. Something may be learned from Montesquieu as well as from Marmontel. Two lines from “Locksley Hall” exhibit the other method of interpreting history. The lines aim at nothing less than at once to condense and illumine the most pregnant epoch of modern times, the eighteenth century. This looks certainly like a preposterous abuse of that definition assigned to the drama, “an abstract and brief chronicle of the time.” Let us recall for a moment the period of Louis Quinze. The feudal system has fallen. The flowers are withered, the chains remain. The nobles have become courtiers, municipal privilege has perished, the peasant is a slave. Dishonor on the throne, bankruptcy in the treasury, the poor starving, the rich corrupt. Oppression tightening his grasp, and knowledge learning to realize the woe and to divine the remedy. On one side, despair that has begun to think of vengeance; on the other, blind arrogance that does not dream of retribution. And now, is not the whole story told with almost terrible simplicity in the compass of these lines?
“Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher
Glares at one that nods and blinks behind a slowly-dying fire.”
It may be said that Byron was well-read in history; but he held that only romantic characters and striking facts were fit subjects of poetic treatment. That is not our opinion. We believe Byron gave the best he had. Moreover, it is not true that poetry may borrow nothing from history but personal traits and isolated events. That narrow view of the poet’s province was corrected for English literature by the Paradise Regained. Poetry is no mendicant, to be put off with the stale scraps and shallow gossip of the servants’ hall. Her seat is at the high table, beside the masters of the house.
Tennyson, we are told, has no dramatic power. It is true that he has written no drama. Does it follow that he is wanting in dramatic power?
Derivation often tells us more of words than of men. A drama is something done, not told or sung; neither narrative nor ode, but something done. First, then, we must have doers; or, if you please, actors. Our actors must prove themselves alive, they must be impelled to move. The impelling force is incident. But detached scenes illustrative of character do not make a drama, incident is not plot. The action which develops character must at the same time tend toward a certain end, the catastrophe of the piece. A drama, then, in the strictest sense is this: a development of character in situations which excite to action in a particular direction.
Where the evolution of plot is subordinate to the portrayal of character, the drama is loose and inorganic, like many of Shakespeare’s plays. Where the elaboration of personal traits is merged in the accomplishment of the event, the drama leans toward the epic, like a tragedy of Æschylus. Perfect equimarch in the development of character and plot stamps the ideal drama. Dramatic power in this sense is one of the rarest of human gifts, and perhaps has been exerted nowhere but in the plays of Sophocles. The phrase has, in English criticism, a much narrower meaning, and points simply to the exhibition of character by action.
We acknowledge that those poems of Tennyson which preceded the “Idylls of the King” gave little evidence of dramatic talent. Like the works of Byron, they are for the most part lyrical, reflective. In them the “beings of the mind” are rather analyzed than animated. The poet interprets them. They do not speak for themselves. Even dramatic insight, which is another thing than dramatic power, seems at times to be wanting. Thus his “Ulysses” is a modern soul grappling with the framework of Homeric times. “Margaret,” “Madeleine,” “Isabel,” are lovely dreams, not lovely women. In the “Princess,” if anywhere, we should look for the development of character. But as the persons of the tale pass across the stage, we incline to suspect with the prince that they are but shadows, “and all the mind is clouded with a doubt.” Indeed, little Lillia, whose burst of pretty petulance suggests the theme, is by far the most lifelike figure.
But the judgment passed upon living poets is at best provisional, and subject to reversal on appeal. The writer of pastorals will perhaps produce an Æneid in his riper years; “L’Allegro” and “Lycidas” may be succeeded by an epic. In the cluster of poems which embodies the Arthurian legends, there is much discrimination of character. The courtly flippancy of “Gawain” is distinguished from Tristram’s joyous levity. “Etarre” is vicious, “Vivien” is base. “Enid” is not a gentler being than “Elaine,” yet her meekness is finely contrasted with the latter’s emotional nature. In “Lancelot” we have a noble spirit in the toils of a great crime. In “Arthur,” the perfect equipose of character, illumined by a sublime resolve.
Nor are the foremost persons of the poems mere portraits. They are actors as well. They approach for the most part unheralded. Their temper and motives are self-betrayed, or hinted with a wise reserve. Their personal traits are evoked by incident or emphasized in dialogue. Here certainly is dramatic power of a certain kind. Not the highest which creates a drama—is it high enough for an epic? We incline to doubt. At least, it has produced none. We cannot allow that the “Idylls” which are grouped around the figure of the king constitute an epic poem.
The epic—we speak of the Æneid—is distinguished from the drama by this, that the development of character is subordinate to the evolution of plot, the actors are merged in the action. And as the drama may lean toward the epic, so the epic may lean toward history. That the poet unites in his own person the functions of scene-painter, machinist, and chorēgus, is only a difference of form.
Now, it is not so much grasp of character as nexus of plot that we miss in the “Idylls.” Scott’s Rokeby is an epic, yet Bertram Risingham is not more lifelike than “Lancelot.” But in Rokeby the story grows; one event generates another, the catastrophe is inevitable. Episodes are admitted in the epic, but they must be natural growths, or at least successful grafts. For example, “Elaine” and “Guinevere” stand in true organic relation, but “Enid” and “Vivien” have nothing in common with the rest of the cycle but their social atmosphere and casual reference to familiar names. In the poet’s mind, no doubt, the old Arthurian romances have been fused into a kind of unity. They present to him a coherent picture; discover a central thought. It is the soul at war with flesh, aspiration foiled by appetite, the eagle stung by the serpent. But he has conveyed the idea by short and random strokes. We catch only glimpses of it, and are not permitted to watch the progressive development. In the “Idylls of the King” there is the matter of an epic, but not the form. We should prefer to place them in a class apart, which might include the Faerie Queen.
On the range, finish, and accuracy of Tennyson’s diction, we need not dwell. But no view of a poet’s artistic powers would be complete without a glance at his command of melody and rhythm. For sweetness and clearness of tone, the choral hymn in the “Lotus-Eaters,” and the “Bugle” and “Cradle” songs which beguile entr’actes in the “Princess” are excelled by few English lyrics. In grasp of rhythm Tennyson yields to no recent poet, except Shelley. There is a striking instance of rhythmic effect in the “Palace of Sin.” A strain of music floats in upon the ear, deepens, swells, and at length bursts forth in an orchestral symphony.
Most of Tennyson’s later poems have been written in unrhymed pentameter, and his management of the verse suggests a comparison with his master. In dignity of movement, Milton has never been equalled by any English poet. It seems that no line but his could express the lost archangel, or embody that vision of imperial Rome where sonorous names load as with cloth of gold the march of the stately iambics. Yet nothing could stoop more awkwardly to the quiet talk and joys of the married pair in Eden. While Tennyson’s blank verse falls short of his model in majesty and serried force, we must allow it to be more flexible. We cannot imagine the little novice using the Miltonic line. Her gentle thoughts would have been drowned in the mighty current, whereas Tennyson’s tripping vocables deliver with easy grace her artless prattle.
We can only allude to those experiments in metre which amuse the leisure of an artist, although one of them deserves attention. It is an ode to Milton:
“O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies,
O skilled to sing of time and eternity,
God-gifted organ-voice of England,
Milton, a name to resound for ages!”
Let the reader compare these lines with some familiar model of Alcaics like “Vides ut altâ,” and then ask himself whether quantity has hitherto had fair play in English verse.