By Professor Henry Butcher[102]
A hundred years have passed since Tennyson’s birth, seventeen years since his death. It is too soon to attempt to fix his permanent place among English poets, but it is not too soon to feel assured that much that he has written is of imperishable worth. Will you bear with me if I offer some brief remarks, not by way of critical estimate, but in loving appreciation of the poet and the man? And let me say at once how deeply all who care for Tennyson are indebted to the illuminating Memoir and Annotated Edition published by his son.
Tennyson’s poetic career is in some respects unique in English literature. He fell upon a time when fiction, science, and sociology were displacing poetry. He succeeded in conquering the poetic indifference of his age. For nearly sixty years he held a listening and eager audience, including not only fastidious hearers but also the larger public. Probably no English poet except Shakespeare has exercised such a commanding sway over both learned and unlearned. He unsealed the eyes of his contemporaries and revealed to them again the significance of beauty. To the English people, and indeed the English-speaking race, he was not merely the gracious and entrancing singer, but also the seer who divined their inmost thoughts and interpreted them in melodious forms of verse.
At the outset of his poetic life, Arthur Hallam notes the “strange earnestness of his worship of beauty.” Like Milton, he was studious of perfection. Like Milton, too, he had in a supreme degree the poet’s double endowment of an exquisite ear for the music of verse and an unerring eye for the images of nature. Like Milton, he acquired a mastery of phrase which has enriched the capacities of our English speech; and not Milton himself drew from the purely English elements in the language more finely modulated tones. No poet since Milton has been more deeply imbued with classical literature, and the perfection of form which he sought fell at once into a classic and mainly a Hellenic mould. We find in him reminiscences or close reproductions not only of Homer and Theocritus, of Virgil and Horace, of Lucretius and Catullus, of Ovid and Persius, but also of Sappho and Alcman, of Pindar and Aeschylus, of Moschus, Callimachus, and Quintus Smyrnaeus, more doubtfully of Simonides and Sophocles. We can follow the tracks of his reading also in Herodotus, Plato, Plutarch, and Livy. His early volumes contain varied strains of classical and romantic legend. In some of the poems we are aware at once of the pervasive atmosphere and enchantment of romance, as in “The Lady of Shalott,” “Mariana,” “Sir Galahad,” and many more. Others—such as “Œnone,” “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus”—what are we to call them, classical or romantic? The thought and the form are chiefly classical, but the poems are shot through with romantic gleams and tinged with modern sentiment. Yet so skilful is the handling that there is no sense of incongruity between the things of the past and the feelings of a later day. The harmony of tone and colour is almost faultless, more so than in the treatment of the longer themes taken from Celtic sources. But while some poems are dominantly classical, others dominantly romantic, Tennyson’s genius as a whole is the spirit of romance expressing itself in forms of classical perfection. To the romanticist he may seem classical; to the classicist he is romantic: romantic in his choice of subjects, in his attitude towards Nature, in his profusion of detail, in an ornateness sometimes running to excess; in his moods, too, of reverie or languor and in the slumberous charm that broods over many of his landscapes. Yet he is free from the disordered individualism of the extreme romantic school. Disquietude and unrest are not wanting, but there is no unruly self-assertion; the cry of social revolt is faintly heard, and, when heard, its tones are among the least Tennysonian. Those who demand subtle or curious psychology find him disappointing; his characters are in the Greek manner broadly human, types rather than deviations from the type. That he was capable of expressing intense and poignant feeling is shown by such impassioned utterances as those of “Fatima” and “Maud”; but passion with him is usually restrained. There are critics for whom passion is genuine only if turbid, just as thought is profound only if obscure; and for them Tennyson’s reserve—again a Greek quality—seems an almost inhuman calm. His own most deeply felt experiences find their truest expression when passed through the medium of art; they come out tranquillized and transfigured. The sorrow and love of “In Memoriam”—which poem I take to be the supreme effort of his genius—are merged in large impersonal emotions. The poem, as he himself says, “is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine.” Tennyson’s intense humanity gives rise to a peculiar vein of pathos, and even of melancholy. Side by side there are his “mighty hopes” for the future and the power and “passion of the past”—“the voice of days of old and days to be”: on the one hand the forward straining intellect, on the other the backward glance, the lingering regret, and “some divine farewell.” Those haunting and recurrent words, “the days that are no more,” “for ever and for ever,” and the “vague world whisper” of the “far-far-away,” are charged with a sadness which recalls the pathetic but stoical refrain of “Nequiquam” in Lucretius.
Throughout Tennyson’s long career we can trace the essential oneness of his mind and art, beginning with his early experiments in language and metrical form. By degrees his range of subjects was enlarged; we are amazed at the ever-growing variety of theme and treatment and his manifold modes of utterance. In some, as in his lyrics and dramatic monologues, he displays a flawless excellence, in almost all consummate art. But diverse as are the chords he has struck, the voice, the touch, the melody are all his own. In his latest poems we may miss something of the early rapture of his lyric song, but he is still himself and unmistakable; and had he written nothing but the lines “To Virgil” and “Crossing the Bar” he would surely take rank among the highest. We think of him primarily as the artist, but the artist and the man in him were never far apart; and as years went on his human sympathies, always strong, were strengthened and broadened, and drew him closer to the common life of humble people. We overhear more of “the still sad music of humanity.” Towards the close of his life the moral and religious content of the poems becomes fuller with his deepening sense of the grandeur and the pathos of man’s existence. Some see in this a weakening of his art, the intrusion into poetry of an alien substance. Yet eliminate this element from art, and how much of the greatest poetry of the world is gone! Now and then, it must be confessed, the ethical aim in Tennyson seems to some of us unduly prominent, but very rarely does the artist lose himself in the teacher or the preacher. He has a message to deliver, but it is not a mere moral lesson: its true appeal is to the imagination; put it into prose and it is no longer his. It lives only in its proper form of imaginative beauty.
Aristotle noted two types of poet, the εὐφυής, the finely gifted artist, plastic to the Muse’s touch, who can assume many characters in turn; and the μανικός, the inspired poet, with a strain of frenzy, who is lifted out of himself in a divine transport. Were we asked to select three examples of the former type, one from Greece, one from Rome, and one from England, our choice from the ancient world would probably fall on Sophocles and Virgil, and might we not, as a fitting third, add Tennyson to the list? I do not attempt to determine their relative rank, but I do suggest that they all belong to the same family, and that already in this centenary year of our Poet we can recognize the poetic kinship. Each of the three had in him the inmost heart of poetry, beating with a full humanity and instinct with human tenderness; each remained true to his calling as an artist and pursued throughout life the vision of beauty; and each achieved, in his own individual way, a noble and harmonious beauty of thought and form, of soul and sense.
JAMES SPEDDING