Copyright by Katherine Tingley, 1911 Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
DIOTIMA, PERIKLES, AND ASPASIA, SEATED
"THE AROMA OF ATHENS"
Now it will be said that there is compassion in the passage quoted from The Princess; and undoubtedly there is; but is not the effort all to manifest it, to make it plain to every one that it is there, to lead it from picture to picture that will feed and excite it? We may say that it is a voice from below upward, an inspiration; it has the style and atmosphere of a great endeavor of the personal self towards the soul: whereas in the other cases, it is the comment and utterance of the soul itself. There, there is no effort to manifest compassion; the effort is all to suppress and control it. The effort is like the metal walls of a bomb, without which the explosive would only fizzle and waste. The poet—Swinburne, Milton, or Dante—had no doubt of his dynamite; it was too mighty, too awesome a thing; all he must do is to make the bomb walls strong, strong, strong. So, in reading, we get the effect, and are blown up—to the altitudes of consciousness. Tennyson, being also a poet, and therefore knowing the nature of dynamite; but writing here, not poetry, but mere criticism of life in the guise of poetry, puts what he can, out of his memory, of dynamite into his work: infuses what he may of the atmosphere of compassion into it. Swinburne and Dante and Milton have a Niagara to deal with, and they must make the channel of it as small as they may; they must dam it as well as they can, or heaven knows where they and the world would be swept to—mere incoherence and blind fury perhaps, or silence. Tennyson (in this case) has to deal with an irrigation scheme, and must make his channels as wide and deep as he can, and coax the waters of the world into them. Then, too, see how he deals with that other quality. He knew well enough that it is integral in the Grand Manner of Poetry, and he will weave it in here, if he may. So we have:
Far from all men I built a fold for them:
* * * * *
And prospered; till a rout of saucy boys
Brake on us at our books.