Among the reminiscences and impressions
of the poet which Lord Tennyson has appended to his second volume, it is only fair to specialize the admirable paper by F. T. Palgrave, which, long as it is, is not by one word too long. That Jowett would write wisely and well was in the nature of things. The only contribution, however, we can quote here is Froude’s, for it is as brief as it is emphatic:—
“I owe to your father the first serious reflexions upon life and the nature of it which have followed me for more than fifty years. The same voice speaks to me now as I come near my own end, from beyond the bar. Of the early poems, ‘Love and Death’ had the deepest effect upon me. The same thought is in the last lines of the last poems which we shall ever have from him.
“Your father in my estimate, stands, and will stand far away by the side of Shakespeare above all other English Poets, with this relative superiority even to Shakespeare, that he speaks the thoughts and speaks to the perplexities and misgivings of his own age.
“He was born at the fit time, before the world had grown inflated with the vanity of Progress, and there was still an atmosphere in which such a soul could grow. There will be no such others for many a long age.”
“Yours gratefully,
“J. A. Froude.”
This letter is striking evidence of the influence Tennyson had upon his contemporaries. Comparisons, however, between Shakespeare
and other poets can hardly be satisfactory. A kinship between him and any other poet can only be discovered in relation to one of the many sides of the “myriad-minded” man. Where lies Tennyson’s kinship? Is it on the dramatic side? In a certain sense Tennyson possessed dramatic power undoubtedly; for he had a fine imagination of extraordinary vividness, and could, as in ‘Rizpah,’ make a character live in an imagined situation. But to write a vital play requires more than this: it requires a knowledge—partly instinctive and partly acquired—of men as well as of man, and especially of the way in which one individual acts and reacts upon another in the complex web of human life. To depict the workings of the soul of man in a given situation is one thing—to depict the impact of ego upon ego is another. When we consider that the more poetical a poet is the more oblivious we expect him to be of the machinery of social life, it is no wonder that poetical dramatists are so rare. In drama, even poetic drama, the poet must leave the “golden clime” in which he was born, must leave those “golden stars above” in order to learn this machinery, and not only learn it, but take a pleasure in learning it.
In honest admiration of Tennyson’s dramatic work, where it is admirable, we yield to none, at the time when ‘The Foresters’ was somewhat coldly accepted by the press on account of
its “lack of virility,” we considered that in the class to which it belonged, the scenic pastoral plays, it held a very worthy place. That Tennyson’s admiration for Shakespeare was unbounded is evident enough.
“There was no one,” says Jowett in his recollections of Tennyson, “to whom he was so absolutely devoted, no poet of whom he had a more intimate knowledge than Shakespeare. He said to me, and probably to many others, that there was one intellectual process in the world of which he could not even entertain an apprehension—that was the plays of Shakespeare. He thought that he could instinctively distinguish between the genuine and the spurious in them, e.g., between those parts of ‘King Henry VIII.,’ which are generally admitted to be spurious, and those that are genuine. The same thought was partly working in his mind on another occasion, when he spoke of two things, which he conceived to be beyond the intelligence of man, and it was certainly not repeated by him from any irreverence; the one, the intellectual genius of Shakespeare—the other, the religious genius of Jesus Christ.”
And in the pathetic account of Tennyson’s last moments we find it recorded that on the Tuesday before the Wednesday on which he died, he called out, “Where is my Shakespeare? I must have my Shakespeare”; and again on the day of his death, when the breath was passing out of his body, he asked for his Shakespeare.
All this, however, makes it the more remarkable that of poets Shakespeare had the least influence upon Tennyson’s art. There was a fundamental unlikeness between the genius of the two men. The only point in common between them is that each in his own way captivated the suffrages both of the many and of the fit though few, notwithstanding the fact that their methods of dramatic approach in their plays are absolutely and fundamentally different. Even their very methods of writing verse are entirely different. Tennyson’s blank verse seems at its best to combine the beauties of the Miltonic and the Wordsworthian line; while nothing is so rare in his work as a Shakespearean line. Now and then such a line as