Old Familiar Faces

by Theodore Watts-Dunton

Tennyson’s knowledge of nature—nature in every aspect—was very great. His passion for “star-gazing” has often been commented upon by readers of his poetry. Since Dante no poet in any land has so loved the stars. He had an equal delight in watching the lightning; and I remember being at Aldworth once during a thunderstorm, when I was alarmed at the temerity with which he persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, in gazing at the blinding lightning. For moonlight effects he had a passion equally strong, and it is especially pathetic to

those who know this to remember that he passed away in the light he so loved—in a room where there was no artificial light—nothing to quicken the darkness but the light of the full moon (which somehow seems to shine more brightly at Aldworth than anywhere else in England); and that on the face of the poet, as he passed away, fell that radiance in which he so loved to bathe it when alive.

If it is as easy to describe the personal attraction of Tennyson as it is difficult to describe that of any one of his great contemporaries, we do not find the same relations existing between him and them as regards his place in the firmament of English poetry. In a country with a composite language such as ours, it may be affirmed with special emphasis, that there are two kinds of poetry; one appealing to the uncultivated masses, whose vocabulary is of the narrowest; the other appealing to the few who, partly by temperament, and partly by education, are sensitive to the true beauties of poetic art. While in the one case the appeal is made through a free and popular use of words, partly commonplace and partly steeped in that literary sentimentalism which in certain stages of an artificial society takes the place of the simple utterances of simple passion of earlier and simpler times; in the other case the appeal is made very largely through what Dante calls the “use of the sieve for noble words.”

Of the one perhaps Byron is the type, the exemplars being such poets as those of the Mrs. Hemans school in England, and of the Longfellow school in America. Of the other class of poets, the class typified by Milton, the most notable exemplars are Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Wordsworth partakes of the qualities of both classes. The methods of the first of these two groups are so cheap—they are so based on the wide severance between the popular taste and the poetic temper (which, though in earlier times it inspired the people, is now confined to the few)—that one may say of the first group that their success in finding and holding an audience is almost damnatory to them as poets. As compared with the poets of Greece, however, both groups may be said to have secured only a partial success in poetry; for not only Æschylus and Sophocles, but Homer too, are as satisfying in the matter of noble words as though they had never tried to win that popular success which was their goal. In this respect—as being, I mean, the compeer of the great poets of Greece—Shakespeare takes his peculiar place in English poetry. Of all poets he is the most popular, and yet in his use of the “sieve for noble words” his skill transcends that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. His felicities of diction in the great passages seem little short of miraculous, and they are so many that it is

easy to understand why he is so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore. That he was not an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will take the trouble to compare the first edition of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with the received text, the first sketch of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ with the play as we now have it, and the ‘Hamlet’ of 1603 with the ‘Hamlet’ of 1604, and with the still further varied version of the play given by Heminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623. If we take into account, moreover, that it is only by the lucky chapter of accidents that we now possess the earlier forms of the three plays mentioned above, and that most likely the other plays were once in a like condition, we shall come to the conclusion that there was no more vigilant worker with Dante’s sieve than Shakespeare. Next to Shakespeare in this great power of combining the forces of the two great classes of English poets, appealing both to the commonplace sense of a commonplace public and to the artistic sense of the few, stands, perhaps, Chaucer; but since Shakespeare’s time no one has met with anything like Tennyson’s success in effecting a reconciliation between popular and artistic sympathy with poetry in England.

The biography of such a poet, one who has had such an immense influence upon the literary history of the entire Victorian epoch—

indeed, upon the nineteenth century, for his work covers two-thirds of the century—will be a work of incalculable importance. There is but one man who is fully equipped for such an undertaking, and fortunately that is his own son—a man of great ability, of admirable critical acumen, and of quite exceptional accomplishments. His son’s filial affection was so precious to Tennyson that, although the poet’s powers remained undimmed to the last day of his life, I do not believe that we should have had all the splendid work of the last ten years without his affectionate and unwearied aid.

II.

All emotion—that of communities as well as that of individuals—is largely governed by the laws of ebb and flow. It is immediately after a national mourning for the loss of a great man that a wave of reaction generally sets in. But the eagerness with which these volumes [132] have been awaited shows that Tennyson’s hold upon the British public is as strong at this moment as it was on the day of his death. This very popularity of his, however, has sometimes been spoken of by critics as though it were an impeachment of him as a poet. “The English public is commonplace,” they say, “and hence the commonplace in poetry suits it.” And no doubt this is true as a general saying, otherwise what would become of certain English poetasters who are such a joy to the many and such a source of laughter to the few? But a hardy critic would he be who should characterize Tennyson’s poetry as commonplace—that very poetry which, before it became popular, was decried because it was merely “poetry for poets.” Still that poetry so rich and so rare as his

should find its way to the heart of a people like the English, who have “not sufficient poetic instinct in them to give birth to vernacular poetry,” is undoubtedly a striking fact. With regard to the mass of his work, he belonged to those poets whose appeal is as much through their mastery over the more subtle beauties of poetic art as through the heat of the poetic fire; and such as these must expect to share the fate of Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. Every true poet must have an individual accent of his own—an accent which is, however, recognizable as another variation of that large utterance of the early gods common to all true poets in all tongues. Is it not, then, in the nature of things that, in England at least, “the fit though few” comprise the audience of such a poet until the voice of recognized Authority proclaims him? But Authority moves slowly in these matters; years have to pass before the music of the new voice can wind its way through the convolutions of the general ear—so many years, indeed, that unless the poet is blessed with the sublime self-esteem of Wordsworth he generally has to die in the belief that his is another name “written in water.” And was it always so? Yes, always.