Authority forgets a dying king
turns up, but very rarely. We agree with all Professor Jebb says in praise of Tennyson’s blank verse.
“He has known,” says he, “how to modulate it to every theme, and to elicit a music appropriate to each; attuning it in turn to a tender and homely grace, as in ‘The Gardener’s Daughter ‘; to the severe and ideal majesty of the antique, as in ‘Tithonus’; to meditative thought, as in ‘The Ancient Sage,’ or ‘Akbar’s Dream’; to pathetic or tragic tales of contemporary life, as in ‘Aylmer’s Field,’ or ‘Enoch Arden’; or to sustained romance narrative, as in the ‘Idylls.’ No English poet has used blank verse with such flexible variety, or
drawn from it so large a compass of tones; nor has any maintained it so equably on a high level of excellence.”
But we fail to see where he touched Shakespeare on the dramatic side of Shakespeare’s immense genius.
Tennyson had the yearning common to all English poets to write Shakespearean plays, and the filial piety with which his son tries to uphold his father’s claims as a dramatist is beautiful; indeed, it is pathetic. But the greatest injustice that can be done to a great poet is to claim for him honours that do not belong to him. In his own line Tennyson is supreme, and this book makes it necessary to ask once more what that line is. Shakespeare’s stupendous fame has for centuries been the candle into which all the various coloured wings of later days have flown with more or less of disaster. Though much was said in praise of ‘Harold’ by one of the most accomplished critics and scholars of our time, Dr. Jebb, [168] the play could not keep the stage, nor does it live as a drama as any one of Tennyson’s lyrics can be said to live. ‘Becket,’ to be sure, was a success on the stage. A letter to Tennyson in 1884 from so competent a student of Shakespeare as Sir Henry Irving declares that ‘Becket’ is a finer play than ‘King John.’ Still, the ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ ‘The
Lotos-Eaters,’ ‘The Gardener’s Daughter,’ outweigh the five-act tragedy in the world of literary art. Of acted drama Tennyson knew nothing at all. To him, evidently, the word act in a printed play meant chapter; the word scene meant section. In his early days he had gone occasionally to see a play, and in 1875 he went to see Irving in Hamlet and liked him better than Macready, whom he had seen in the part. Still later he went to see Lady Archibald Campbell act when ‘Becket’ was given “among the glades of oak and fern in the Canizzaro Wood at Wimbledon.” But handicapped as he was by ignorance of drama as a stage product how could he write Shakespearean plays?
But let us for a moment consider the difference between the two men as poets. It is hard to imagine the master-dramatist of the world—it is hard to imagine the poet who, by setting his foot upon allegory, saved our poetry from drying up after the invasion of gongorism, euphuism, and allegory—it is, we say, hard to imagine Shakespeare, if he had conceived and written such lovely episodes as those of the ‘Idylls of the King,’ so full of concrete pictures, setting about to turn his flesh-and-blood characters into symbolic abstractions. There is in these volumes a curious document, a memorandum of Tennyson’s presented to Mr. Knowles at Aldworth in 1869, in which an elaborate
scheme for turning into abstract ideas the characters of the Arthurian story is sketched:—
K.A. Religious Faith.
King Arthur’s three Guineveres.
The Lady of the Lake.
Two Guineveres, ye first prim Christianity. 2d Roman Catholicism: ye first is put away and dwells apart, 2d Guinevere flies. Arthur takes to the first again, but finds her changed by lapse of Time.
Modred, the sceptical understanding. He pulls Guinevere, Arthur’s latest wife, from the throne.
Merlin Emrys, the Enchanter. Science. Marries his daughter to Modred.
Excalibur, War.
The Sea, the people / The Saxons, the people } the S. are a sea-people and it is theirs and a type of them.
The Round Table: liberal institutions.
Battle of Camlan.
2d Guinevere with the enchanted book and cup.