we cannot but at once allow the obvious excellence of the mere writing, but if we want acute analysis of sorrow in her more elusive moods or discovering flights of mysticism, we shall find little enough of satisfaction. Here is nothing but the most childlike assertion of calm grief and its reflection in the calm dissolution of an autumn landscape. But if we are content with a mood so unvexed by argument, a thought so incapable of obscurity, we shall be well rewarded. For this very fixity of emotional purpose, to be confused perhaps by an unsympathetic judgment with an empty self-sufficiency, achieves its own purity of poetic style with, for us, its accompanying delight. It is just because Tennyson is so singly intent upon the elementary content matter of his poetry that he has no need of care to avoid assuming other men’s emotions, or, more precisely, their emotional accent. In the “calm is the morn” passage there is not a word that is obviously reminiscent. Tennyson’s mind may be a figure of homespun in the intellectual world, but it can appear in any company without the slightest embarrassment and apparently without any temptation to ape livelier or more ceremonious wits. This poet was in a literal sense too simple to be in even remote danger of borrowing “sessions.”
Of the journalistic virus Tennyson’s style cannot be said to be so entirely free. When he was concerned with the life of his own moods he was, as has just been said, proof against poetic suggestion from without, but when his subject was some public occasion or some external event that only accidentally came within his own experience, he was not so wholly proof against the clichés of journalism. It is true that he was one of the best occasional poets in the language, and particularly in the graver manner of his laureate office. And yet, even in the justly famous Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington there is, in parts at least, a lower level of integrity in expression than, for example again, in our passage from In Memoriam, where, with the doubtful exception of “that noble breast,” there is not a word that is not manifestly of the poet’s own minting. But in the Ode, written clearly upon an occasion by which Tennyson was deeply moved, and one rich in associations that were of peculiar appeal to his genius, he cannot keep his style wholly free of editorial influence. This is not to speak in disparagement of a poem to which on the whole the term magnificent is not misapplied, and one of the supreme successes of its kind. But to acknowledge this is not to concede that the whole of the splendid eulogy of “the statesman-warrior, moderate, resolute” is couched in terms of pure poetry. It was hardly the Tennyson of the finest authority whom we find addressing Nelson thus—
Thine island loves thee well, thou famous man,
The greatest sailor since our world began....
and Wellington as—
England’s greatest son,
He that gain’d a hundred fights
Nor ever lost an English gun ...
and as being
as the greatest only are,