But we bethink us of the greater poets, sons of the elder time. There was David, prince of lyric-singers; there was Shakespeare, greatest maker among men. The lyricist was a king, a statesman, a warrior, and a prophet; the leisure of his very youth was the leisure of occupation, when the flocks were feeding safe in the green pastures, and by the quiet waters; and even then the dreaming poet-eye had need to be wary, and sometimes flashed into sudden lightning at sight of the lion which the stripling slew. He sung out of the tumult and fulness of his heart—out of the labours, wars, and tempests of his most human and most troubled life: his business in this world was to live, and not to make poems. Yet what songs he made! They are Holy Writ, inspired and sacred; yet they are human songs, the lyrics of a struggling and kingly existence—the overflow of the grand primal human emotions to which every living heart resounds. His “heart moved him,” his “soul was stirred within him”—true poet-heart—true soul of inspiration! and not what other men might endure, glassed in the mirror of his own profound poetic spirit, a study of mankind; but of what himself was bearing there and at that moment, the royal singer made his outcry, suddenly, and “in his haste,” to God. What cries of distress and agony are these! what bursts of hope amid the heartbreak! what shouts and triumphs of great joy! For David did not live to sing, but sang because he strove and fought, rejoiced and suffered, in the very heart and heat of life.
Let us say a word of King David ere we go further. Never crowned head had so many critics as this man has had in these two thousand years; and many a scorner takes occasion by his failings, and religious lips have often faltered to call him “the man after God’s own heart;” yet if we would but think of it, how touching is this name! Not the lofty and philosophic Paul, though his tranced eyes beheld the very heaven of heavens; not John, although the human love of the Lord yearned towards that vehement angel-enthusiast, whose very passion was for God’s honour; but on this sinning, struggling, repenting David, who fights and falls, and rises only to fall and fight again—who only never will be content to lie still in his overthrow, and acknowledge himself vanquished—who bears about with him every day the traces of some downfall, yet every day is up again, struggling on as he can, now discouraged, now desperate, now exultant; who has a sore fighting life of it all his days, with enemies within and without, his hands full of wars, his soul of ardours, his life of temptations. Upon this man fell the election of Heaven. And small must his knowledge be, of himself or of his race, who is not moved to the very soul to think upon God’s choice of this David, as the man after His own heart. Heaven send us all as little content with our sins as had the King of Israel! Amen.
And then there is Shakespeare: never man among men, before or after him, has made so many memorable people; yet amid all the crowding faces on his canvass, we cannot point to one as “the portrait of the painter.” He had leisure to make lives and histories for all these men and women, but not to leave a single personal token to us of himself. The chances seem to be, that this multitudinous man, having so many other things to think of, thought marvellously little of William Shakespeare; and that all that grave, noble face would have brightened into mirthfullest laughter had he ever heard, in his own manful days, of the Swan of Avon. His very magnitude, so to speak, lessens him in our eyes; we are all inclined to be apologetic when we find him going home in comfort and good estate, and ending his days neither tragically nor romantically, but in ease and honour. He is the greatest of poets, but he is not what you call a poetical personage. He writes his plays for the Globe, but, once begun upon them, thinks only of his Hamlet or his Lear, and not a whit of his audience; nor, in the flush and fulness of his genius, does a single shadow of himself cross the brilliant stage, where, truth to speak, there is no need of him. The common conception of a poet, the lofty, narrow, dreamy soul, made higher and more abstract still by the glittering crown of light upon his crested forehead, is entirely extinguished in the broad flood of sunshine wherein stands this Shakespeare, a common man, sublimed and radiant in a very deluge and overflow of genial power. Whether it be true or not that these same marvellous gifts of his would have made as great a statesman or as great a philosopher as they made a poet, it does not lie in our way to discover; but to know that the prince of English poets did his work, which no man has equalled, with as much simplicity and as little egotism as any labouring peasant of his time—to see him setting out upon it day by day, rejoicing like a strong man to run a race, but never once revealing to us those laborious tokens of difficulties overcome, which of themselves, as Mr Ruskin says, are among the admirable excellences of Art—to perceive his ease and speed of progress, and how his occupation constantly is with his story and never with himself,—what a lesson it is! But alas, and alas! we are none of us Shakespeares. Far above his motives, we would scorn to spend our genius on a Globe Theatre, or on any other vulgar manner of earning daily bread. The poet is a greater thing than his poem; let us take it solely as an evidence of his progress; and in the mean time, however he may tantalise the world with his gamut and his exercises, let all the world look on with patience, with awe, and with admiration. True, he is not making an Othello or a Hamlet; but never mind, he is making Himself.
Yet the thought will glide in upon us woefully unawares,—What the better are we? We are ever so many millions of people, and only a hundred or two of us at the utmost can be made happy in the personal acquaintanceship of Mr Tennyson or (we humbly crave the Laureate’s pardon for the conjunction) Mr Dobell. In this view of the question, it is not near so important to us that these gentlemen should perfect the poet, as that they should make the poem. We ask the Laureate for a battle-song, and he gives us a skilful fantasia upon the harp; we hush our breath and open our ears, and, listening devoutly to the “Eureka!” of here and there a sanguine critic, who has found a poet, wait, longing for the lay that is to follow. Woe is upon us!—all that we can hear in the universal twitter is, that every man is trying his notes. We are patient, but we are not a stoic; and in the wrath of our disappointment are we not tempted a hundred times to plunge these melodious pipes into the abyss of our waste-paper basket, and call aloud for Punch, and the Times?
Yes, that great poetic rebel, Wordsworth, has heavier sins upon his head than Betty Foy and Alice Fell; it is to him we owe it, that the poet in these days is to be regarded as a delicate monster, a creature who lives not life but poetry, a being withdrawn out of the common existence, and seeing its events only in the magic mirror of his own consciousness, as the Lady of Shallott saw the boats upon the river, and the city towers burning in the sun. The Poet of the Lakes had no imaginary crimes to tell the world of, nor does it seem that he regarded insanity as one of the highest and most poetic states of man; but we venture to believe there never would have been a Balder, and Maud should have had no crazy lover, had there been no Recluse, solemnly living a long life for Self and Poetry in the retired and sacred seclusion of Rydal Mount.
It is in this way that the manner which is natural and a necessity to some one great spirit, becomes an intolerable bondage and oppression to a crowd of smaller ones. The solemn egotism, self-reserved and abstract, which belonged to Wordsworth, is more easily copied than the broad, bright, manful nature of our greatest English poet, who was too mighty to be peculiar; and the delusion has still a deeper root. It is in our nature, as it seems, to scorn what is familiar and common to all the world; priesthoods, find them where you will, are bound to profess a more ethereal organisation, and seek a separated atmosphere. Wordsworth is a very good leader; but for a thorough out-and-out practical man, admitting no compromise with his theory, commend us to Anthony the Eremite, the first of all monkish deserters from this poor sinking vessel, the world. The poet is the priest of Nature; out with him from this Noah’s ark of clean and unclean,—this field of wheat and tares, growing together till the harvest,—this ignoble region of common life. Let the interpreter betake him to his monastery, his cloister, his anchorite’s cell—and when he is there? Yes, when he is there—he will sing to us poor thralls whom he has left behind, but not of our ignoble passions and rejoicings, or the sorrows that rend our hearts. Very different from our heavy-handed troubles, rough troopers in God’s army of afflictions, are the spectre shapes of this poetic world. True, their happiness is rapture, their misery of the wildest, their remorse the most refined; but the daylight shines through and through these ghostly people, and leaves nothing of them but bits of cloud. Alas, the preaching is vain and without profit! What can the poet do—when he is tired of his Mystic, sick of his Balder, weary of Assyrian bulls and lords with rabbit-mouths? Indeed, there seems little better left for him than what his predecessors did before. The monk spent his soul upon some bright-leaved missal, and left the record of his life in the illumination of an initial letter, or the border of foliage on a vellum page; the poet throws away his in some elaborate chime of words, some new inverted measure, or trick of jingling syllables. Which is the quaintest? for it is easy to say which is the saddest waste of the good gifts of God.
Also it is but an indifferent sign of us, being, as we undoubtedly are, so far as poetry is concerned, a secondary age, that there can be no dispute about the first poet of our day. There is no elder brotherhood to compete for the laurel; no trio like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; no guerilla like Byron to seize upon the contested honour, nor Irish minstrel to strike a sugared note of emulation. Should a chance arrow at this moment strike down our poetic champion, so far from comforting ourselves, like King Henry, that we have “five hundred as good as he,” we could not find for our consolation one substitute for Tennyson. Echoes of him we could indeed find by the score; but no one his entire equal in all the field. Let no one say we do not appreciate poetry; in these mechanical days there are still a goodly number of singers who could echo that unfortunate admission which cost Haverillo his life, and was the last stroke of exasperation to the redoubtable Firmilian, “I have a third edition in the press.” But in spite of Smith and Dobell, the Brownings and the Mystics, our Laureate holds his place; holding his laurel with justice and right less disputable than most of his predecessors. Yet our admiration of Tennyson is perplexed and unsatisfactory. He is the first in his generation, but out of his generation he does not bear comparison with any person of note and fame equal to his own. He is small in the presence of Wordsworth, a very inferior magician indeed by the side of Coleridge; his very music—pardon us, all poets and all critics!—does not flow. It may be melodious, but it is not winged; one stanza will not float into another. It is a rosary of golden beads, some of them gemmed and radiant, fit to be set in a king’s crown; but you must tell them one by one, and take leisure for your comment while they drop from your fingers. They are beautiful, but they leave you perfectly cool and self-possessed in the midst of your admiration. To linger over them is a necessity; it becomes them to be read with criticism; you go over the costly beadroll and choose your single favourites here and there, as you might do in a gallery of sculpture. And thus the poet chooses to make you master of his song,—it does not seize upon you.
This is a kind and manner of influence which poets have not often aimed at. Hitherto it has been the object of this fraternity to arrest and overpower their audience as the Ancient Mariner fascinated the wedding guest; and we all know how helplessly, and with what complete submission, we have followed in the train of these enchanters, wheresoever it pleased them to turn their wayward footsteps. But Mr Tennyson aims at a more refined and subtle influence than this downright enslaving. A poet who writes, or seems to write, because he cannot help it,—and a poet who writes, or seems to write, of set purpose and malice prepense, are two very different persons. A man of the first class could not have written In Memoriam. Had he been mourning, he must have mourned a closer grief, and broken his heart over it, ere he had wept the half of those melodious tears; but for the poet quietly selecting a subject for his poem, the wisest philosopher could not have suggested a better choice. A great deal has been said and written on this subject, and we are fully aware that grief does not make books, or even poems, except in very rare and brief instances, and that the voice of a great sorrow is a sharp and bitter outcry, and not a long and eloquent monologue. But Mr Tennyson does not present himself to us under the strong and violent compulsion of a great sorrow. It is not grief at his heart which makes him speak, using his gifts to give ease and utterance to its burden of weeping; but it is himself who uses his grief, fully perceiving its capabilities, and the entrance it will give him into the sacred and universal sympathy of his fellows. For, like all great works of art, this poem appeals to one of the primitive and universal emotions of human nature. The dead—the early dead, the beloved, the gifted, the young: we may discuss the appropriateness of the tribute, but we cannot refuse to be moved by its occasion. No man can look on these pages without finding here and there a verse which strikes home; for few of us are happy enough to live so much as twenty years in this weary world of ours without some In Memoriam of our own.
Yet we cannot complain of Mr Tennyson that he makes merchandise of any of the nearest and closest bereavements, the afflictions which shake the very balance of the world to those who suffer them. His sorrow is as much of the mind as of the heart; he weeps a companion beloved, yet almost more honoured and esteemed than beloved—a friend, not even a brother, still less a child or a wife;—enough of the primitive passion to claim sympathy from all of us, but not so much that our sympathy loses itself in a woe beyond consolation. Pure friendship is seldom so impassioned; but had it been a commoner tie—a relationship more usual—these gradual revelations of grief in all its successive phases must have been too much at once for the poet and his audience. This nice discrimination secures for us that we are able to read and follow him into all those solemn regions of thought and fancy which open at the touch of death; he does not fall down upon the grave, the threshold, as we are but too like to do, and we wander after him wistfully, beguiled with the echo of this thoughtful weeping, which must have overpowered us had it been as close or as personal as our own. We feel that over our own minds these same thoughts have flashed now and then—a momentary gleam—while we were wading in the bitter waters, and woefully making up our minds, a hundred times in an hour, to the will of God; but who could follow them out? The poet, more composed, does what we could not do; he makes those flashes of hope or of agony into pictures visible and true. Those glimpses of the face of the dead, of the moonlight marking out upon the marble the letters of his name, those visions of his progress now from height to height in the pure heavens, all the inconsistent lights and shadows—mingled thoughts of the silence in the grave, and of the sound and sunshine of heaven—not one of them is passed over. People say it is not one poem, but a succession of poems. It must have been so, or it would not have been true. One after another they come gleaming through the long reverie of grief—one after another, noting well their inconsistencies, their leaps from day to night, from earth to heaven, the poet has set them down. He knows that we think of the lost, in the same instant, as slumbering under the sod and as awaking above the sky; he knows that we realise them here and there, as living and yet as dead; he knows that our
“fancy fuses old and new,