like Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford.
“Thus her intense, untold delight,
In deep or vivid colour, smell, and sound,
Was flattered day and night.”
Lockhart was not fond of Sir Walter’s experiments in gas, the “smell” gave him no “deep, untold delight,” and his “infamous review” was biassed by these circumstances.
The volume of 1833 was in nothing more remarkable than in its proof of the many-sidedness of the author. He offered mediæval romance, and classical perfection touched with the romantic spirit, and domestic idyll, of which The May Queen is probably the most popular example. The “mysterious being,” conversant with “the spiritual world,” might have been expected to disdain topics well within the range of Eliza Cook. He did not despise but elevated them, and thereby did more to introduce himself to the wide English public than he could have done by a century of Fatimas or Lotos-Eaters. On the other hand, a taste more fastidious, or more perverse, will scarcely be satisfied with pathos which in process of time has come to seem “obvious.” The pathos of early death in the prime of beauty is less obvious in Homer, where Achilles is to be the victim, or in the laments of the Anthology, where we only know that the dead bride or maiden was fair; but the poor May Queen is of her nature rather commonplace.
“That good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace,”
strikes a note rather resembling the Tennysonian parody of Wordsworth—
“A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman.”
The Lotos-Eaters, of course, is at the opposite pole of the poet’s genius. A few plain verses of the Odyssey, almost bald in their reticence, are the point de repère of the most magical vision expressed in the most musical verse. Here is the languid charm of Spenser, enriched with many classical memories, and pictures of natural beauty gorgeously yet delicately painted. After the excision of some verses, rather fantastical, in 1842, the poem became a flawless masterpiece,—one of the eternal possessions of song.
On the other hand, the opening of The Dream of Fair Women was marred in 1833 by the grotesque introductory verses about “a man that sails in a balloon.” Young as Tennyson was, these freakish passages are a psychological marvel in the work of one who did not lack the saving sense of humour. The poet, wafted on the wing and “pinion that the Theban eagle bear,” cannot conceivably be likened to an aeronaut waving flags out of a balloon—except in a spirit of self-mockery which was not Tennyson’s. His remarkable self-discipline in excising the fantastic and superfluous, and reducing his work to its classical perfection of thought and form, is nowhere more remarkable than in this magnificent vision. It is probably by mere accidental coincidence of thought that, in the verses To J. S. (James Spedding), Tennyson reproduces the noble speech on the warrior’s death which Sir Walter Scott places in the lips of the great Dundee: “It is the memory which the soldier leaves behind him, like the long train of light that follows the sunken sun, that is all that is worth caring for,” the light which lingers eternally on the hills of Atholl. Tennyson’s lines are a close parallel:—
“His memory long will live alone
In all our hearts, as mournful light
That broods above the fallen sun,
And dwells in heaven half the night.”