Of Argo first
Startled the unknown sea.
he is using the only two adjectives which the place required, and which it truthfully admits. They are exactly the two epithets which a Greek might put. Yet, no doubt, the untutored mind asks for something more assertive, something which will cut more sharply or press more heavily into the unready imagination. Than Mycerinus, than Sohrab and Rustum, than Philomela, Thyrsis, or The Strayed Reveller, one can find nothing more absolutely Greek in point of execution, though one may know Greek passages which stir profounder emotional depths.
Tennyson’s debts to classical authors have been treated by Mr. Churton Collins in a monograph. That critic is right in saying that the knowledge of a scholar is requisite to appreciate Tennyson fully, however much he may be appreciated by those who are no scholars. No man has ever been better read in previous poetry than Tennyson, and no man has known better how to assimilate what he found, or has possessed a surer tact and taste in using it. With Tennyson the Greek matter is, as with Milton, imbedded in his own, not overlaid. Greek forms of verse are moulded to his purpose. The Greek style, describing what is luminously seen in a few luminous touches, is ever conspicuous. He neither tries to disguise his borrowings, nor does he obtrude them. When he says, “for now the noonday quiet holds the hill,” he is translating Callimachus; when “the charm of married brows,” Theocritus; when “shadowy thoroughfares of thought,” Sophocles; when “sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows,” Homer. His device of making the sound answer to the sense, as in
I heard the water lapping on the crag,
And the long-ripple washing in the reeds,
is a common device of the Greeks. In point of form his Œnone is modelled on Theocritus; his Ulysses and his Tithonus are framed after the soliloquies in Greek plays. His Lotus-eaters gets its matter from Homer, Bion, and Moschus. Everywhere we meet hints and reminiscences of Simonides, or Pindar, or Theocritus, or Anacreon. But these are all incorporated, amalgamated in a body of work which is wholly in keeping with them in taste, in tone, in diction—in short, in style.
This age of ours, to put it briefly, has been an age of stylists, of artists who work on principles derived from their education in Greek, and their love, which every scholar feels, of that glorious and undying literature.