It need hardly be said that these particular passages, and possibly some of the others, may be mere coincidences, but they illustrate what numberless other passages which could be cited prove that Tennyson’s careful and meditative study of the Greek and Roman poets enabled him to enrich his work by these felicitous adaptations.
He used those poets as his master Virgil used his Greek predecessors, and what the elder Seneca said of Ovid, who had appropriated a line from Virgil, might exactly be applied to Tennyson: “Fecisse quod in multis aliis versibus Virgilius fecerat, non surripiendi caus, sed palam imitandi, hoc animo ut vellet agnosci”.[[5]]
He had plainly studied with equal attention the chief Italian poets, especially Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso. On a passage in Dante he founded his Ulysses, and imitations of that master are frequent throughout his poems. In Memoriam, both in its general scheme as well as in numberless particular passages, closely recalls Petrarch; and Ariosto and Tasso have each influenced his work. In the poetry of his own country nothing seems to have escaped him, either in the masters or the minor poets.[[6]] To apply the term plagiarism to Tennyson’s use of his predecessors would be as absurd as to resolve some noble fabric into its stones and bricks, and confounding the one with the other to taunt the architect with appropriating an honour which belongs to the quarry and the potter. Tennyson’s method was exactly the method of two of the greatest poets in the world, Virgil and Milton, of the poet who stands second to Virgil in Roman poetry, Horace, of one of the most illustrious of our own minor poets, Gray.
An artist more fastidious than Tennyson never existed. As scrupulous a purist in language as Cicero, Chesterfield and Macaulay in prose, as Virgil, Milton, and Leopardi in verse, his care extended to the nicest minutiæ of word-forms. Thus “ancle” is always spelt with a “c” when it stands alone, with a “k” when used in compounds; thus he spelt “Idylls” with one “l” in the short poems, with two “l’s” in the epic poems; thus the employment of “through” or “thro’,” of “bad” or “bade,” and the retention or suppression of “e” in past participles are always carefully studied. He took immense pains to avoid the clash of “s” with “s,” and to secure the predominance of open vowels when rhythm rendered them appropriate. Like the Greek painter with his partridge, he thought nothing of sacrificing good things if, in any way, they interfered with unity and symmetry, and thus, his son tells us, many stanzas, in themselves of exquisite beauty, have been lost to us.
[2] De Sublimitate, xvii.
[3] Tennyson’s blank verse in the Idylls of the King (excepting in the Morte d’Arthur and in the grander passages), is obviously modelled in rhythm on that of Shakespeare’s earlier style seen to perfection in King John. Compare the following lines with the rhythm say of Elaine or Guinevere;—
But now will canker sorrow eat my bud,
And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost;
As dim and meagre as an ague’s fit:
And so he’ll die; and, rising so again,
When I shall meet him in the court of heaven
I shall not know him: therefore never, never
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.
—King John, III., iv.
[4] Illustrations of Tennyson.
[5] Seneca, third Suasoria.
[6] For fuller illustrations of all this, and for the influence of the ancient classics on Tennyson, I may perhaps venture to refer the reader to my Illustrations of Tennyson. And may I here take the opportunity of pointing out that nothing could have been farther from my intention in that book than what has so often been most unfairly attributed to it, namely, an attempt to show that a charge of plagiarism might be justly urged against Tennyson. No honest critic, who had even cursorily inspected the book, could so utterly misrepresent its purpose.