But we are not left to these conjectural consolations. I believe that I take very safe ground when I say that our living poets present a variety and amplitude of talent, a fulness of tone, an accomplishment in art, such as few other generations in England, and still fewer elsewhere, have been in a position to exult in. It would be invidious, and it might indeed be very difficult and tedious, to go through the list of those who do signal honour to our living literature in this respect. Without repeating the list so patiently drawn up and so humorously commented upon by Mr. Traill, it would be easy to select from it fifteen names, not one of which would be below the fair meridian of original merit, and many of which would rise far above it. Could so much have been said in 1592, or in 1692, or in 1792? Surely, no. I must not be led to multiply names, the mere mention of which in so casual a manner can hardly fail to seem impertinent; yet I venture to assert that a generation which can boast of Mr. Swinburne and Miss Christina Rossetti, of Mr. William Morris and Mr. Coventry Patmore, of Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr. Robert Bridges, has no reason to complain of lack of fire or elevation, grace or versatility.
It was only in Paradise, so we learn from St. Basil, that roses ever grew without thorns. We cannot have the rose of such an exceptional life as Tennyson's without suffering for it. We suffer by the void its cessation produces, the disturbance in our literary hierarchy that it brings, the sense of uncertainty and insufficiency that follows upon it. The death of Victor Hugo led to precisely such a rocking and swaying of the ship of literature in France, and to this day it cannot be said that the balance there is completely restored. I cannot think that we gain much by ignoring this disturbance, which is inevitable, and still less by folding our hands and calling out that it means that the vessel is sinking. It means nothing of the kind. What it does mean is that when a man of the very highest rank in the profession lives to an exceptionally great age, and retains his intellectual gifts to the end, combining with these unusual advantages the still more fortuitous ones of being singular and picturesque in his personality and the object of much ungratified curiosity, he becomes the victim, in the eyes of his contemporaries, of a sort of vertical mirage. He is seen up in the sky where no man could be. I trust I shall not be accused of anything like disrespect to the genius of Tennyson—which I loved and admired as nearly to the pitch of idolatry as possible—when I say that his reputation at this moment is largely mirage. His gifts were of the very highest order; but in the popular esteem, at this moment, he holds a position which is, to carry on the image, topographically impossible. No poet, no man, ever reached that altitude above his fellows.
The result of seeing one mountain in vertical mirage, and various surrounding acclivities (if that were possible) at their proper heights, would be to falsify the whole system of optical proportion. Yet this is what is now happening, and for some little time will continue to happen in crescendo, with regard to Tennyson and his surviving contemporaries. There is no need, however, to cherish "those gloomy thoughts led on by spleen" which the melancholy events of the past month have awakened. The recuperative force of the arts has never yet failed the human race, and will not fail us now. All the Tit-Bits and Pearson's Weeklies in the world will not be able to destroy a fragment of pure and original literature, although the tastes they foster may delay its recognition and curtail its rewards.
The duty of all who have any influence on the public is now clear. So far from resigning the responsibility of praise and blame, so far from opening the flood-gates to what is bad—on the ground that the best is gone, and that it does not matter—it behoves those who are our recognised judges of literary merit to resist more strenuously than ever the inroads of mere commercial success into the Temple of Fame. The Scotch ministry preserve that interesting practice of "fencing the tables" of the Lord by a solemn searching of would-be communicants. Let the tables of Apollo be fenced, not to the exclusion or the discomfort of those who have a right to his sacraments, but to the chastening of those who have no other mark of his service but their passbook. And poetry, which survived the death of Chaucer, will recover even from the death of Tennyson.
1892.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] See Mr. Hall Caine's interesting article in the Times for October 17th, 1892.
SHELLEY in 1892